5

I've noticed that LuaTeX seems to incorrectly render continuing characters (like a circumflex, U+0302) when they follow Greek letters. I'm particularly interested in getting this to work with a monospaced font (because it comes up in code blocks):

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec} 
\setmonofont{DejaVu Sans Mono}
\begin{document}
\texttt{â \quad b̂ \quad ĉ \quad α̂ \quad β̂ \quad γ̂ \quad α̇ \quad β̇ \quad γ̇}
\end{document}

monospaced greek letters with continuing circumflex

I've tried several fonts and haven't been able to find one that works, and I'm wondering whether it's a general font issue or more TeX-specific.

2
  • 1
    The Greek language doesn't use the circumflex accents. Maybe that's the reason?
    – Bernard
    Mar 3, 2019 at 20:00
  • It does use a circumflex in Classical Greek. Aug 2, 2019 at 9:40

2 Answers 2

1

I think this is font related. DejaVu Sans Mono does not work in TeX or LibreOffice.

But Noto Sans Mono works fine. Try:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec} 
\setmonofont{Noto Sans Mono}
\begin{document}
\texttt{â \quad b̂ \quad ĉ \quad α̂ \quad β̂ \quad γ̂ \quad α̇ \quad β̇ \quad γ̇}
\end{document}

output

1
  • Had to turn off ligatures for that font, because they look pretty strange for a mono, but this solution works great. Mar 4, 2019 at 2:30
2

This is font related: In a Unicode fonts, the accents are mostly placed using so called anchors: Every character has a special position marked in the font file, such that a marked position of the accent is aligned with this "anchor". The font designers did not add these anchors to greek letters.

Of course you could fix this by adding the anchors yourself, but if you only need this in rare situation and only with small characters, you can just position the accent manually. Most of the time you just need \llap to place the accent over the next character and sometimes you have to \raise it too. For example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec} 
\setmonofont{DejaVuSansMono.ttf}
\begin{document}
\texttt{â \quad b̂ \quad ĉ \quad \llap{̂}α \quad \raisebox{2pt}{\llap{̂}}β \quad \llap{̂}γ \quad \llap{̇}α \quad \raisebox{2pt}{\llap{̇}}β \quad \llap{̇}γ}
\end{document}

enter image description here

2
  • Greek has accents; modern monotonic Greek uses the acute accent (tónos) and the dieresis (dialytiká). Polytonic Greek uses more.
    – egreg
    Mar 3, 2019 at 22:54
  • @egreg Thanks. I deleted that note. Mar 4, 2019 at 7:13

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