I think the umlaut diacritics are symbols, accents, placed on letters. They signal a certain change in sound when sounding out letters with reference to the unaccented counterparts. For example, for a, u, o the accented counterparts are ä, ü, ö. Notice that the umalaut is denoted here with dots.
- Is it possible to change these dots into something else? Namely use longer vertical "pretty" umlauts instead of dots. Here is a handwritten example:
The closest option I have found is {\H a} giving 
. The umlauts themselves are more-less what I am after, but they are slanted, not vertical-ish. But I place no constraint that you have to make the umlauts as in {\H a}. If you think that something else looks better, and your option follows the handwritten example in spirit, that is perfectly fine. In fact, if these umlauts in {\H a} are made vertical and if they then look ugly, some other solution is preferred.
Additional things to consider or just additional information:
- Should also work with capital letters, so with
Ä, Ü, Öas well. - Do not have to be strictly vertical. In fact, should match inclination of letters themselves; that probably looks better.
- The plan is to just use them as letters when writing.
- If solutions otherwise preserve the encoding and packages in MWE, that would be ideal.
- The simpler the syntax, the better. Ideally, writing
ä, ö, üwould use the longer vertical option by default. (Not compulsory) - This is with
pdflatex.
If you are worried about why I want to do this... For the time being, I am experimenting to see whether it could be done and whether it can be made to look decent. After all there is a saying:
Everything is possible in (La)TeX, it just may not be easy.
MWE to start with:
\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[LGR,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[english]{babel}
\begin{document}
ö ä ü {\H a}
\end{document}
