Mike,
character. The characters happen to be in the Bengali block of Unicode,
but I suppose it's the same with any combining character.
Not necessarily. I don't know whether you are on Windows, Linux, or
Mac, but I can tell you that on Windows Uniscribe allows one to insert
combining characters used (mainly) with western languages, i.e. those in
the U+0300 range, without forcing a dotted circle to appear. (But some
fonts are programmed to add a dotted circle.) With Arabic and Indic
languages, however, Uniscribe is quite strict about putting in the
dotted circle.
I've tried putting a ZWNJ, ZWJ, ZWSP, and CGJx; none of them work. I
either get a rectangular box or a dashed circle to the left (or in one
case, to the right) of the combining character.
The Unicode Standard says (2.11) that one should use U+00A0 NO-BREAK
SPACE as a base to display combining marks. So you might try that. I
suspect, however, that unless the font maker has specifically included
this option, you'll end up with the dotted circle, at least on Windows.
But: since you posted this to the XeTeX list, I'll assume that's what
you're using (so my comments about Uniscribe won't apply since XeTeX
uses the ICU renderer). I just did a quick test with a file processed
with XeLaTeX on Windows, and the following lines worked (with no dotted
circles):
{\fontspec{Arial Unicode MS} \char"09C2 xx \char"09C4}
{\fontspec{Arial Unicode MS} \char"00A0\char"09C2 xx \char"00A0\char"09C4}
(I don't know BEngali and have no idea about what characters interact
how, so I threw in the x's just to get some separation between the
Bengali combining marks. U+09C2 and 09C4 are Bengali combining marks
that I chose at random since I don't know exactly what you need. I used
Arial Unicode MS only because I was sure it had the Bengali characters.)
HTH - David
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