Mike Maxwell's original post hasn't shown up here yet, so I'm lumping two responses together.
> Date: Fri, 22 May 2015 12:24:49 -0600 > From: Bobby de Vos <devos.bo...@gmail.com> > Reply-To: "XeTeX (Unicode-based TeX) discussion." <xetex@tug.org> > > On 2015-05-22 10:49, maxwell wrote: > > On 2015-05-22 10:14, David M. Jones wrote: > >> ... > >> P.S. There's actually a third class of bug that is clearly visible in > >> the table at the top of my document, but which I didn't mention > >> explicitly: XeTeX won't typeset one of the Devanagari combining > >> characters in isolation without adding a prothetic dotted circle > >> (U+25CC). > > > > I was waiting for someone who knows more about this than I do to > > answer, but I'll display my ignorance. > > > > Afaik that's not a bug, that's the way combining characters are > > *supposed* to render when they don't have any character to combine This is, I think, debatable, as shown by the fact that XeTeX does *not* add the dotted circle for any of the combining diacritical in the 0300 block, and LuaTeX doesn't add them for the Devanagari marks. So at the very least, this is a matter of consistency. > > with. There's a way to prevent that; I _think_ it's to precede the > > combining character by a non-breaking space (U+00A0). But I haven't > > tried that. You're correct: that is the suggested Unicode coding and it does in fact work. (I thought I tried it before and it didn't work, but either I'm misremembering or it was before I upgraded to the latest XeTeX.) > Some minority languages (that is, not the dominate language using a > particular script) often use combining marks in ways not envisioned in > order to extend the script to cover all the sounds in the minority > language. So for those minority languages, having a dotted circle show > up is not very helpful. Arguably, it never is -- if you want a dotted circle, you can add it yourself, whereas it's not at all unusual to want to show combining marks in isolation in, say, textbooks. But I admit this is an edge case, which is probabably why I decided against drawing attention to it in my original sourceforge bug report. I wish I had stuck to my earlier resolve. Cheers, David. > Bobby > > -- > Bobby de Vos > /devos.bo...@gmail.com/ > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex
