[NTG-context] Commercial fonts and diacritics

[hanneder--- via ntg-context <ntg-context@ntg.nl>]

I feel that I should have solved the following question myself---I  
have a long history of making
diacritics for Sanskrit work in different incarnations of TeX since  
1991---but I have never
understood the technicalities of otf fonts.

Currently I am trying to use high quality Adobe Fonts for Sanskrit  
texts, which need the following
diacritics: āīūṛś ḍḷṭṣṃḥṛṝṣṅṇ (ideally also with capitals). The font  
Adobe Text Pro prints them
perfectly, but Minion Pro does not.

However, if you enter your own text on the fontshop website, it seems  
to work, and this is why I
prematurely bought yet another new version of Minion Pro, hoping that  
it would work this time.

If you look at font with fontforge, many utf code positions for Indic  
Transliteration are empty,
i.e. Minionpro does not have the characters with diacritics, Adobe  
Text Pro has them. So far, so
good (or not).

The hotline of fontshop.com thinks that there is an OpenType feature  
that creates so-called
Composits out of the elements. I can understand the mechanism, I guess  
I have tweaked something
similar in pdflatex or OmegaTeX in the pre-otf era, but I have no idea  
whether one of these
mechanism can be utilised in Xe-, Lua- Or ConTeXt nowadays. I was  
hoping that some fontfeatures
(fakecombining=yes,compose=yes) would do the trick, but apparently  
they do not.

In a sense this is no big deal. There are many nice fonts around (and  
those that come with ConTeXt
are great), but I was used to printing books with an old Type-1 Minion
(www.ctan.org/pkg/w-a-schmidt) and find it hard to accept that this  
should not be possible with the
modern flavours of TeX.


My system:

This is LuaTeX, Version 1.16.0 (TeX Live 2023/Arch Linux)
open source     > level 1, order 1, name  
'/usr/share/texmf-dist/tex/context/base/mkiv/cont-yes.mkiv'


Minimal example:

\enableregime[utf]
\setuppapersize[A4]

\definefontfeature[default][default][fakecombining=yes,compose=yes]

\starttypescript [serif] [adobetextpro]
   \definefontsynonym[AdobeTextPro-Regular]      
[file:AdobeTextPro-Regular] [features=default]
   \definefontsynonym[AdobeTextPro-Italic]           
[file:AdobeTextPro-Italic]  [features=default]
   \definefontsynonym[AdobeTextPro-Bold]            
[file:AdobeTextPro-Bold]  [features=default]
\stoptypescript

\starttypescript [serif] [adobetextpro] [name]
   \definefontsynonym [Serif]           [AdobeTextPro-Regular]
   \definefontsynonym [SerifItalic]     [AdobeTextPro-Italic]
   \definefontsynonym [SerifBold]       [AdobeTextPro-Bold]
\stoptypescript

\starttypescript [adobetextpro]
   \definetypeface [adobetextpro] [rm] [serif] [adobetextpro]  
[default] [features=default]
\stoptypescript




\starttypescript [serif] [minionpro]
   \definefontsynonym[MinionPro-Regular]     [file:MinionPro-Regular]  
[features=default]
\stoptypescript

\starttypescript [serif] [minionpro] [name]
   \definefontsynonym [Serif]           [MinionPro-Regular]
\stoptypescript

\starttypescript [minionpro]
   \definetypeface [minionpro] [rm] [serif] [minionpro] [default]  
[features=default]
\stoptypescript



\setupbodyfont[minionpro]

\starttext

Test of Diacritics for ``Indic transliteration''

MinionPro:   āīūṛś ḍṭṣṃḥṛṣ   %  here no underdot diacritics

\setupbodyfont[adobetextpro]

Adobe Text Pro  āīūṛś ḍṭṣṃḥṛṣ  % here all diacritics show

\stoptext





---

Prof. Dr. Juergen Hanneder
Philipps-Universitaet Marburg
FG Indologie u. Tibetologie
Deutschhausstr.12
35032 Marburg
Germany
Tel. 0049-6421-28-24930
hanneder@staff.uni-marburg.de

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