How to get accented letters (ogonek) in a specific font?

Question

I need to use a specific font (New Aster LT Standard), and I am running into issues with 2 characters in my text. One is the polish ogonek on the name "Dąbrówka", the other is an accented c in the name "Matanić". Oddly, the font seems to have the ogonek diacritic (see line 2 of the PDF image), but it does not show correctly when combined, only as a standalone. I have \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} and \usepackage[T1]{fontenc} in my preamble. I must compile with XeLaTeX. My .tex document is in UTF8. I tried various ways (see example), but none is working (see screen capture).

Help?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainfont{New Aster LT Std}
\setmainlanguage{french}
\setotherlanguage{polish}
\begin{document}
   Johannes Dąbrówka.  A. Matanić.
   \par

   ‬Johannes Da˛brówka.  A. Matani\'c.
    \par

   Johannes D\k{a}brówka.  A. Matani\'{c}.
   \par



\end{document}

Answer 1

You can try any of the following:

Load your modern font through fontspec and type in the character ą (U+0105). In XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX, you can also write ^^^^0105.

A font might also support the combining accent ą (a + U+0328). You can also type this as a^^^^0328. Latin Modern Roman does not have this accent, but New Computer Modern does.

The LaTeX command is \k{a}. If this doesn’t work for your font but ^^^^0105 does, you can try loading uninormalize to convert to NFC form.

If your font contains the non-combining ogonek ˛ (U+02DB), you might be able to overlay it with the TeX primitive \accent"02DB a. With Latin Modern Roman, the ogonek below is positioned wrong, but accents above should be better.

\documentclass{article}
\tracinglostchars=2 % Warn if a font does not contain a character!
\usepackage{newcomputermodern}
\newcommand\aogonek{\accent a ^^^^02db}
\begin{document}
^^^^0105
a^^^^0328
\accent"02DB a
\k{a}
\end{document}

In PDFTeX, a-with-ogonek is in the T1 encoding. The precomposed character should work, as well as \k{a}, but combining accents generally don’t in PDFTeX.

All of the same methods should also work for, in the order you should try them, ć (U+0107), ć (c + U+0301), \'{c}, \accent"02CA c, or \accent"00B4 c.

Answer 2

Use font that has the letters you need, in example TexGyre. (with TexGyre)

But If you really need to use that font you can define new letters with newunicodechar⁴.

% !TeX program = xelatex
\documentclass[xetex,twoside]{article}
\tracinglostchars=3 % Warn if a font does not contain a character
\usepackage{fontspec}
%\setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]{TeX Gyre Pagella}
\setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]{New Aster LT Std}
\usepackage{polyglossia}
\setmainlanguage{french}
\setotherlanguage{polish}
\usepackage{newunicodechar}
\makeatletter
\newunicodechar{ć}{\add@accent{^^^^00b4}{c}} \newunicodechar{ó}{\add@accent{^^^^00b4}{o}}
\newunicodechar{á}{\add@accent{^^^^00b4}{a}} \newunicodechar{ą}{\add@accent{^^^^02db}{a}}
\makeatother
\begin{document}
   Johannes Dąbrówka.  A. Matanić.\par


\end{document}

(with (Old) New Aster LT Std) (with newunicodechar)