Printing rare characters

Question

I need to run LaTeX on a file that contains, for example, the following words: ḥarain [unicode 1E25] and Amaziɣ [a Berber word]. These paste OK into my .tex file as they do here, but when I run the pdflatex command I get errors, a lot of overfill and underfills for the first, and for the second that it is not set up for LaTeX. I have not used xelatex because it produces other problems. As for the ḥ I thought of \cfudot, but I don't know what package offers the command.

See this thread for the dotted letter: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/20789/tex-accents-do-not-seem-to-work-with-fontspec-and-xe-lua-latex — AML, May 21 '18 at 12:54
Is ɣ meant to be a lowercase gamma? If so, see this thread: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/30894/using-math-without-or — AML, May 21 '18 at 12:55
I don't think it's a gamma: highlight the character in the Q and google search gives Ɣ (wikipedia) — Chris H, May 21 '18 at 14:17
Right but it also says: The symbol in the International Phonetic Alphabet that represents this sound is ⟨ɣ⟩, a Latinized variant of the Greek letter gamma, ⟨γ⟩, which has this sound in Modern Greek. So maybe there are options for how to display that letter. — AML, May 21 '18 at 14:25
I, and I assume egreg, gave pdflatex-based solutions, because it seemed like the OP didn't want to use xeletex. — AML, May 21 '18 at 15:52

score 6 · Answer 1 · answered May 21 '18 at 13:10

The LATIN SMALL LETTER H WITH DOT BELOW (U+1E25) doesn't pose real problems, as you can use \d{h}. For LATIN SMALL LETTER GAMMA (U+0263) you need a font supporting it. With Computer Modern, you can use tipa.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
%\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % not needed for LaTeX from 2018-04-01

\usepackage{tipa} % for \textgamma

\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{1E24}{\d{H}}      % uppercase
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{1E25}{\d{h}}      % lowercase
\DeclareUnicodeCharacter{0263}{\textgamma} % no uppercase

\begin{document}

ḥarain

Amaziɣ

\end{document}

AML · Answer 2 · 2018-05-21T14:33:02.317

Here is a simple option, though I'm not sure what the ɣ is supposed to look like exactly. Edit to add two font options.

%pdflatex    
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[greek,english]{babel} % for the first option

\usepackage{tipa} % for the second option

\begin{document}
\d{h}arain  Amazi\textgreek{g} % first option

\d{h}arain  Amazi\textipa{G} % second option

\end{document}

For reference, here is a chart of how to display IPA letters under the \usepackage{tipa} package.

score 2 · Answer 3 · answered May 21 '18 at 14:26

2

For any such character it is usually easier to use xelatex or lualatex than pdflatex. If your browser can display a character, then you can specify the same font to xetex or luatex.

Here is your text in Times, set with xelatex

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{fontspec}

\setmainfont{Times New Roman}

\begin{document}

 ḥarain [unicode 1E25] and Amaziɣ [a Berber word]
\end{document}

answered May 21 '18 at 14:26

David Carlisle

757,742

1

Haines Brown: With all due respect to egreg, I'd strongly suggest you use David's solution. TIPA is a deeply problematic font for linguistics. Yes, it has all the symbols you could ever want, but only in Computer Modern and only in roman, bold, and slanted. Publishers will generally want Times, Minion, etc. and will need italics (for in-text citation). The result is a deeply dissatisfying. It's a shame that the brains behind TIPA have never addressed this major hurdle to the font's usability. – Daniel Harbour May 21 '18 at 14:48
I appreciate the responses. The obvious answer would be to go to xelatex, but I found it introduces too many problems. The \d{h} I should have spotted. As for the Berber letter (don't know if it is a lower case gamma) I ended up loading the latex.el package into my emacs, and that gave me access to the \textgamma command (which gives proper shape in contrast to (\gamma), – Haines Brown May 22 '18 at 18:44

Printing rare characters

3 Answers3