Dot below character in Garamond Premier Pro

Report · Jan 23, 2012

Hi,

I'm trying to figure out how to get a dot below the letters H, t, and s in Garamond Premier Pro. The combining mark doesn't seem to work, and the specific glyphs don't exist. Any ideas?

Most other fonts seem to work, e.g.:

Ḥ ṭ ṣ

Kind regards,

Lyndon

Report · Jan 25, 2012

Most fonts will seem to work if the software you are using is MS Word, which silently substitutes whatever font it can find on your system to display a code not available in the current font. But in fact, fonts offering dotted letters (from the Unicode subset Latin Extended Additional) are quite uncommon; Garamond Premier Pro offers more than most, though not yours. Fileformat.info can give you a list of fonts containing "latin small letter s with dot below" if you Google "unicode 1E63" without the quotes, though I assume Garamond Premeier Pro isn't among the fonts they check.

David

Report · Jan 25, 2012

Thanks for the response. I actually tried it in both Mellel and InDesign, both of which highlight missing characters. What puzzles me is that I found the same problem with Minion Pro, but I'm sure I've seen books using Minion Pro which include those characters (they are typically used for Latin alphabet transcription of Hebrew and other ancient semitic languages).

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Lyndon Drake

Report · Jan 25, 2012

If your project is for print only then it doesn't really matter how you get your dots. You could, for example, use Garamond Premier Pro's "dot above" (U+02D9) and re-position it below the letters where you need it. For an electronic publication, I might borrow the combining dot below (U+0323) from another font that does have it and then use kerning to position the dot properly.

David

Report · Jan 26, 2012

Ah, I see. That makes sense, though it would be a bit time consuming for small projects.

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Lyndon Drake

Report · Jan 26, 2012

For just a few dotted-s, for example, I tend to make one instance look good, and then copy-and-paste it wherever it is needed. In InDesign I suppose one could define a character style "s_for_dot" so that it includes the kerning to make the following dot character overlap horizontally. But for more than a few, I try to get whoever chooses the typeface to base the selection on having the necessary characters -- and as I say there aren't many fonts with dotted letters -- or to let me customize the fonts. However, the latter opens up a whole can of worms: many font licenses expressly forbid modification (Adobe has been a notable exception); even if modifying is allowed the structure of a modern OpenType font is so complex Fontlab may not be able to decompile it properly, and one of the "features" you stand to lose is the kerning.

David