Overlaying caron and a vowel in boldface and italic styles

Question

I found that a lovely typeface I wanted to use did not contain the graphs ǎ ě ǐ ǒ ǔ ǚ, which I need for Pinyin romanization in text mode. Discussion below takes ǎ as the example.

Using the graph ǎ as literal text or as its Unicode codepoint ^^^^01ce produces a blank; the normal caron-composition macro \v{a} etc. also produces a blank. Surely all three cases come about because the typeface lacks a glyph for the composite graph.

The glyph for \textasciicaron alone does exist in the font:

and I can create a passable rendering of ǎ manually using

`\rlap{\textasciicaron}\kern.7pt a` : 

The problem is that it does not render correctly either in boldface or italics (kerning adjusted to .1pt on the latter):

and

I suppose that is because the \textasciicaron, either alone or overlaid, is not affected by those processes, at least not in standard syntax. FakeSlant and FakeBold similarly have no effect on \textasciicaron.

Can anyone suggest another line of attack to get these glyphs in bold and italic?

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EDIT: My original posting concerned the font TeX Gyre Termes; shortly after posting, I realized that my version of the font was out of date and the new version has the glyphs I was discussing. So I have removed discussion of the font but left my question, since I think it is a valid one that I was unable to solve on my own.

Answer 1

Example in Plain with XeTeX:

\font\termes="TeX Gyre Termes"
\font\bftermes="TeX Gyre Termes/B"
\font\ittermes="TeX Gyre Termes/I"
\def\caron#1{{\accent"02C7 #1}}
\termes
W\caron ass\caron{a}p?
\bftermes
W\caron ass\caron{a}p?
\ittermes
W\caron ass\caron{a}p?
\bye