LaTeX diacritics (Was: Re: Orthography typesetter!)

On Fri, May 17, 2002 at 10:04:41PM +0200, Philip Newton wrote:
> On 17 May 02, at 8:05, H. S. Teoh wrote:
>
> > multiple diacritics per letter
>
> How do you do that in LaTeX? I tried to do that in one text I was
> transcribing which had an accute accent over an i-breve... but the
> acute accent got rendered before, not over, the i-breve when I tried
> the obvious \'{\u{\i}}.
I think the problem might be that LaTeX's default accent commands require
a single-character argument. One way to correct this is to force the
argument to be a single object (i.e., a box):

        \`{\mbox{\u{\i}}}

I think this should work.  If that doesn't do it, try using the equivalent
math mode accents (the math mode accent commands are more capable of
handling odd accents, probably because of the odd way mathematicians write
things :-P).  For my case, what I used is this:

        \ensuremath{\acute{\bar{\mbox{\i}}}}

(Of course, you want \grave instead of \acute for your case.) The embedded
\mbox{} isn't really needed for \i, but for plain letters you need it to
force LaTeX to typeset it as normal text (since it's in math mode).
Otherwise it will come out as a variable name in italics, which probably
isn't what you want. You probably want to make this a command, so that you
don't have to type this long monster every time you need that
double-accent.

For more fancy stuff, such as using non-default accent symbols, I've had
to resort to pretty complex box-making stuff (looks a bit scary, but is no
sweat if you put it into a command, and besides, if you do it right the
results will usually be very impressive).


T

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