LaTeX forum ⇒ Fonts & Character Sets ⇒ Classical Greek aspiration mark shifts to letter or punctuation on the left Topic is solved

[DataLinkDroid]

The MWE below shows the problem that I am having with the aspiration mark above the Greek rho letter. When I typeset, for example, the two words, 'μηδὲ ῥάβδον', the aspiration mark above the first letter of the second word, shifts to the last letter of the first word (so that the epsilon at the end of the first word has two diacritics instead of one).

Note that the above shifting only happens with the letter rho (vowels are fine). I was surprised when this happened, because the 'rho with breathing mark' is a single Unicode character (encoded in UTF8). Somehow, the letter was recognised, split into a letter + diacritic, and then the diacritic moved to be placed over a different glyph.

I am using XeLaTeX and not pdfLaTeX.

Is this a known issue, or is there something I haven't done? It seems like everything else is working perfectly.

Thanks for any assistance or pointers you may be able to give.

David

MWE: (I have added \Huge just for readability.)

Code: [Select all] [Expand/Collapse] [Download] ({untitled.tex})

\documentclass{article}
 
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
 
\setmainlanguage[variant=british]{english}
\setotherlanguage[variant=poly]{greek}
 
\setmainfont{Cardo}
 
\begin{document}
 
\begin{greek}
  \Huge μηδὲ ῥάβδον
\end{greek}
 
\end{document}

[Stefan Kottwitz]

Hi David!

I don't have the Cardo font on my Mac so I cannot test it. But I tested with pdfLaTeX for comparison and it works normally.

Code: [Select all] [Expand/Collapse] [Download] ({untitled.tex})

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[greek]{babel}
\begin{document}
  \Huge μηδὲ ῥάβδον
\end{document}

greek.png (6.3 KiB) Viewed 1175 times

Stefan

[DataLinkDroid]

It's good to know, Stefan, that it at least works in pdfLaTeX. I'm going to try using a different font for the Greek text and see how that goes, if it makes any difference.

David

[DataLinkDroid]

Well, there seems to be some peculiarity with the Cardo font that is triggering the issue. A couple of other fonts that I have just tried are working fine (Linux Libertine O and GFS Artemisia). Attached is a sample of the latter.

A simple:

Code: [Select all] [Expand/Collapse] [Download] ({untitled.tex})

\newfontfamily\greekfont{GFS Artemisia}[Script=Greek]

was all that was needed.

Thanks again for testing it out.

Regards,
David