Put two dots above beta

Question

I try to put two dots above a beta ancient greek character like this \"β But a beta symbol is too tall, so the dots are printed on the beta symbol. How can I move dots up? The dots should go above the symbol. Using math formula I can realized this something like this

  \documentclass{article}
    \begin{document}
    \[\stackrel{..}{\beta}\]
    \end{document}

But, how can I got it without using math formula?

My setup is

\documentclass[openany]{book}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\usepackage{array}
\usepackage{makecell}
\usepackage{multirow}
\usepackage{tabularx}
\usepackage{titlesec} 
\usepackage{rotating}
\usepackage{fancyhdr}
\usepackage{lastpage}
\usepackage{float}
\setdefaultlanguage{russian}
\setotherlanguage[variant=ancient]{greek}
\setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]{Times New Roman}
\newfontfamily\greekfont{New Athena Unicode}
\newfontfamily\cyrillicfont{Times New Roman}[Script=Cyrillic]

Please tell us more about the mysterious β symbol: Is it maybe supposed to be the (mostly German) "ess-zett" (aka "scharfes S") character? Or is a text-mode beta character? (I gather it's not supposed to be the math-mode character \beta...) — Mico, Feb 07 '21 at 18:55
Your code is already perfectly fine to me. I can see two dots above the beta symbol. Please be more specific. — SebGlav, Feb 07 '21 at 18:59
Yes, two dots are above the beta, but may be too high. And it is not a math text, I suppose to avoid the math formulas. It is a simple diacritic symbol. I try to find charset what contains beta with to dots but don't find it. — Alex E., Feb 07 '21 at 19:10

egreg · Accepted Answer · 2021-02-08T17:35:25.933

It mostly depends on how you input beta. Here's a possibility.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{textgreek}
\newcommand{\betaumlaut}{%
  {\fontencoding{LGR}\selectfont\accdialytika{b}}%
}
\begin{document}
\betaumlaut
\end{document}

If you use fontspec and Unicode fonts with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX, you can (provided the Greek font is good) do

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\newfontfamily{\greekfont}{Gentium}
\begin{document}
{\greekfont&quot;β}
\end{document}

Unfortunately, New Athena Unicode is not among the “good” fonts, because if I try the above code with this font I get

For the particular font you can do

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\newfontfamily{\greekfont}{newathu}[
  Extension=.ttf,
  UprightFont=5_7,
  BoldFont=Bold5_7,
  ItalicFont=Italic5_7,
  BoldItalicFont=BoldItalic5_7,
]
\newcommand{\manualdialytika}[1]{%
  \leavevmode\vbox{\offinterlineskip
    \ialign{\hfil##\hfil\cr\symbol{"A8}\cr\noalign{\kern-1ex}#1\cr}%
  }%
}
\begin{document}
{\greekfont\manualdialytika{β}}
\end{document}

(How you load New Athena Unicode depends on whether you installed it as a system font, which I chose not to do.)

I just use New Athena Unicode font. I install font, define font family \newfontfamily\greekfont{New Athena Unicode} and using it {\greekfont διᾱϰόσιοι}. — Alex E., Feb 08 '21 at 15:13
@AlexE. I added how to do it in a clean way, if the Greek font is good and an “unclean way” otherwise. — egreg, Feb 08 '21 at 17:36

Put two dots above beta

1 Answers1