[XeTeX] Newbie Question: Accessing Glyph

[Alexander Schultheiß]

Hello Marc

>  o I'd like to know how to access certain glyphs in the font
>   files. For example, the euro symbol, the long es, and
>   ornamental symbols.

The command you're probably looking for is \char"<hex> where <hex> is
the hexadecimal number of the glyph in the font. You don't know the
number? See below ...

> I'd appreciate it if somebody could provide some pointers
> which explain how to define proper commands for individual
> glyphs and how to fix the diacritics.

You can redefine the command once you know the hexadecimal numbers of
the diacritics you need; e.g. macron below is 0331, thus you define

\def\b#1{#1\char"0331}.

This command defines a command sequence \b with a parameter called
'#1'. '#1' will be the glyph under which the macron will be put. The
command say, take glyph '#1' and put the glyph at pos. \char"0331
behind it. Since macron below is a combining diacritical mark it has
negative width and will be placed under the preceding letter, roughly
spoken.

> I'd appreciate it if somebody could recommend a nice unix
> tool that allows me to view the font tables? (I've googled
> around a bit but I failed to find anything nice.)

fontforge

Regards, Alex