Writing diacritics with Minion Pro

[Abr...@adobeforums.com]

I noticed with surprise that many Adobe fonts, including one of my favourites Minion Pro, do not have the commonest set of diacritic marks used for transliterations from non-latin scripts (like in Unicode Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B, Latin Extended Additional). When I use text processors like Word or others (Latex) these characters are not available and I have to switch to another type of font. Does this problem have a solution? I can't believe that a set of professional set of fonts like Minion is not suitable for being used in scholarly publications. Please note that I am a Mac user.

Thank you

[Dominic...@adobeforums.com]

Sorry, are you saying that you can't find the Latin-1 Supplement, Latin Extended-A, Latin Extended-B sets in Minion Pro? Because my quick check indicated that they're present in Minion Pro. Latin Extended Additional is not (that I could see), but I guess in those cases the idea would be for the typesetting software to combine the standalone diacritics with the base letter.

Note that those fonts that don't carry the Pro label won't have the extended language support that the Pro fonts have - while they may have some additional glyphs, you're basically looking at the ISO set.

[Thomas_...@adobeforums.com]

Minion doesn't have all the accented character combinations it could, and also doesn't have the "combining" versions of the standalone diacritics. On the other hand, Mac OS doesn't yet (10.4.x) support the OpenType positioning functionality (mark attachment) needed to make such diacritics work well in most Mac apps. InDesign CS3 has such functionality itself regardless; I don't know about LeTeX.

Adobe has the long-term intention to further expand Minion and Myriad to add more glyphs and OpenType mark attachment functionality. But such new versions won't be available any time soon, so don't hold your breath.

Regards,

T