Fonts & Character SetsClassical Greek aspiration mark shifts to letter or punctuation on the left

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DataLinkDroid
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Nov 14, 2018 4:00 am

Classical Greek aspiration mark shifts to letter or punctuation on the left

Post by 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

\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}
Attachments
Problem Example
Problem Example
2018-11-14_13-24-18.png (10.02 KiB) Viewed 6958 times

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Stefan Kottwitz
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Posts: 10319
Joined: Mon Mar 10, 2008 9:44 pm

Classical Greek aspiration mark shifts to letter or punctuation on the left

Post by 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

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[greek]{babel}
\begin{document}
  \Huge μηδὲ ῥάβδον
\end{document}
greek.png
greek.png (6.3 KiB) Viewed 6942 times
Stefan
LaTeX.org admin
DataLinkDroid
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Nov 14, 2018 4:00 am

Classical Greek aspiration mark shifts to letter or punctuation on the left

Post by 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
Posts: 5
Joined: Wed Nov 14, 2018 4:00 am

Classical Greek aspiration mark shifts to letter or punctuation on the left

Post by 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

\newfontfamily\greekfont{GFS Artemisia}[Script=Greek]
was all that was needed.

Thanks again for testing it out.

Regards,
David
Attachments
GFS Artemisia font
GFS Artemisia font
2018-11-15_10-54-53.png (6.05 KiB) Viewed 6925 times
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