Are there umlaut variants for non-blackletter fonts?

Question

In the yfonts package for blackletter fonts, there is an option varumlaut that puts a tiny "e" instead of the two dots on your umlaut ä, ö, ü.

Is there any other font that has these kind of glyphs? (In particular, I am searching for a Garalde typeface).

Answer 1

These old style umlauts were most common in Fraktur typefaces, so i don’t think that there are any Antiqua fonts with them as stylistic variant.

So i think the best solution for your problem is to define a new generic command \oldumlaut{base letter}{accent letter} to make this glyphs yourself. Here’s a quick and dirty implementation:

\newcommand{\oldumlaut}[2]{\leavevmode\smash{\tabcolsep0pt\tabular[b]{c}\tiny #2\\[-1.6ex]#1\endtabular}}

But this will only work for regular text and lower case letters. Here’s a more advanced solution with graphicx and tipa:

\documentclass{scrartcl}

% Fancy implementation:
\usepackage{graphicx}
\usepackage{tipa}
    % Maybe you should tweak this for your font:
\DeclareRobustCommand{\oldumlaut}[2]{\Upperaccent[.2ex]{\scalebox{0.5}{#2}}{#1}}

\usepackage{fontspec} % loaded after tipa because of different definition of \sups
\setmainfont{Linux Libertine O} % or your Garalde font

\begin{document}

\newcommand{\content}{%
W\oldumlaut{a}{e}rme ſtatt Wärme,\\
F\oldumlaut{o}{e}hn statt Föhn,\\
Gl\oldumlaut{u}{e}ck ſtatt Glück.}

\content

\textit{\content}

\end{document}

If you want to typeset a longer text with the old umlauts, you probably should define shortcuts like \newcommand{\oae}{\oldumlaut{a}{e}}. Or you could even try to make ä a active character. But this would be a) nasty and b) annother question ;).