AW: [docbook-apps] Capital latin "Q" with dot above

["Frank Steimke" <f-steimke@berger-und-steimke.de>]

We are writing an article (hopefully it will become an official standard of our national standardization authority, DIN) about a set of characters that every ICT system in Germany should support. The article is written in docbook, because its main part is generated from a character database (subset of Unicode Character Database UCD). We have plenty of sequences with diacritical characters, like LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K WITH COMBINING DOT ABOVE. It is a "combining character sequence" in the sense of the Unicode standard. It is very easy to write them down in docbook. Since docbook is XML, you can use the general mechanism for representation of arbitrary characters by their hex-code: "K̇" (character LATIN CAPITAL LETTER K immediately followed by the character with hex-code 0307, which is COMBINING DOT ABOVE). You can do exactly the same for LATIN CAPITAL LETTER Q WITH COMBINING DOT ABOVE, although I did not find that in our database. Q̇ is not a result of any ISO recommendation for transcription from other scripts to latin, right?

So writing down the combining character sequence is no problem at all, however it has to be supported by a font in the final PDF file. If the default font does not work: Have a look at Google Noto Fonts (https://www.google.com/get/noto/).  

Sincerely,
Frank

> -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----
> Von: maxwell <maxwell@umiacs.umd.edu>
> Gesendet: Dienstag, 12. Juni 2018 20:48
> An: Jan Tosovsky <j.tosovsky@email.cz>
> Cc: 'DocBook Apps' <docbook-apps@lists.oasis-open.org>
> Betreff: RE: [docbook-apps] Capital latin "Q" with dot above
> 
> On 2018-06-12 14:14, Jan Tosovsky wrote:
> > You cannot combine multiple characters to form the composed one. If
> > there is Unicode character for this combination, you can use it
> > directly. If it is not displayed correctly, it means your font doesn't
> > contain this character and you need to switch to the font with broader
> > character support.
> 
> You can if, as jmt pointed out, one of the characters (the dot, in this
> case) is a Unicode combining diacritical mark.  At least you can in systems I've
> used, for most fonts.  Systems I've used in this case means XeLaTeX (a
> Unicode-aware version of LaTeX) and Microsoft Word.  I have not used the
> XSL-FO transform, but hopefully it works there too.
> 
> There may of course be Latin fonts where the dot-over is not defined, and
> there might possibly be fonts where it is defined but where it doesn't
> position itself correctly over some base characters (particularly where there
> is more than one diacritic, i.e. stacked diacritics).  Fonts should come with a
> chart that tells what code points they handle, but that information can
> sometimes be difficult to find.
> 
>     Mike Maxwell
>     University of Maryland
> 
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