[XeTeX] fonts and diacritics

[Robert Zydenbos]

I have experimented with a number of fonts in XeTeX for Indological use, with mixed results. If one wants to have a pleasant and clear distance between the letters and the diacritics, *and* also a correct positioning of the diacritics, *and* also the possibility to use italics and bold type (and both combined) by means of simple \textbf, \emph etc., without going into TeXy things (like declaring typefaces with "slanted=...", "extended=..." etc.), my personal favourite is Charis SIL. But also the Linux Libertine fonts are good, as are FreeSerif / FreeSans / FreeMono, and the Liberation series of fonts. Also most of the TeXGyre fonts are quite usable.

Not every one in the Gentium family of fonts (also SIL) supports bold and bold slanted, but they too can be recommended. SIL (www.sil.org) also has a very nice Nagari font named Annapurna, which has become my favourite for that script.

Robert Zydenbos
--
Prof. Dr. Robert J. Zydenbos
Institut für Indologie und Tibetologie
Universität München

On Jun 13, 2015, at 18:18 , Dominik Wujastyk <wujastyk at gmail.com> wrote:

> I think both Junicode and LM have charsets that cover Indological use well.  Personally, I'm not so keen on Times-like fonts, so I tend not to use Junicode.  I have done books with CM (<>LM) fonts in the past, and I have the highest respect for Don Knuth's work and the Modern style, but again, my current tastes are towards more classic styles like Bembo, Palatino, Baskerville, etc.  With Hermann Zapf's recent passing, I feel some loyalty to using Palatino at the moment. 
> 
> Sanskrit 2003 is my favourite font containing Devanagari, if give a little horizontal stretching*, and it also contains a Roman font (Times-Roman like).  So it's quite convenient for typesetting mixed Roman/Nagari text in a simple way, especially since the hyphenation tables for Sanskrit contain both Devanagari and Roman at once.
> 
> Best,
> Dominik  
> 
> * For using the Devanagari on its own:
> \setmainfont[FakeStretch=1.08,
> Script=Devanagari,
> Language=Sanskrit,
> Mapping=velthuis-sanskrit]
> {Sanskrit 2003}
> 
> On 13 June 2015 at 13:26, Nathan Sidoli <nathan.sidoli at utoronto.ca> wrote:
> Dear Dominik,
> 
> Do you have any opinion on Junicode or Latin Modern for transliteration from Indic languages?
> 
> Best,
> 
> Nathan