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I'm working on a document with diacritics. Everything was going well until I needed to use an Ḥ (H with a dot under) as a small capital for titles in the table of contents. These titles are set in small capitals.

At first, I thought that the font didn't have them. I spent quite some time looking for fonts that had support; I could not find any. I then decided to add them using Font Forge. After hunting for the Unicode address, I have come to the conclusion that this might not exist.

Case in point (XeLaTeX with Adobe Garamond Pro):

Image of problem

Is it true that Ḥ doesn't exist as a small capital?

I've checked the following:

  1. Latin Map charts -- Unicode
  2. List of Latin script letters -- Wikipedia
  3. Small Caps -- Wikipedia
  4. Voiceless epiglottal fricative -- Wikipedia. This is what a small capital H represents.
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  • Small caps are not separate Unicode code points; they're variants. None of the small caps exist separately as such. If you look through an OpenType font with good small caps support, you'll see that it has every (if it's a good font) character as a small caps variant.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Jul 5, 2017 at 5:59
  • YOu should prbably be using a Tex engine then you can just redefine a character with a dot. Failing that use a some combining diatric mark.
    – joojaa
    Jul 5, 2017 at 6:22
  • @JanusBahsJacquet Are you saying it's like bold and italic?
    – Khalid Hussain
    Jul 5, 2017 at 6:50
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    @KhalidHussain No, those are different cuts. You won't find bold and italic variants in the same font as the regular characters; they're in separate files. They're more like swashes or alternates, like a font having ɑ as an alternate for a. Of course, in older fonts (pre-OpenType), these would have to be separate fonts as well because there was no support for keeping them in the same font, so in those fonts they would essentially all be like bold and italic.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Jul 5, 2017 at 6:53
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    @KhalidHussain you should probably ask this separately on TeX.SE
    – joojaa
    Jul 5, 2017 at 9:36

3 Answers 3

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The character doesn't (as far as I can see) exist in Unicode, it may very well exist as a character in a font though, so check through the small caps in your font first...

Small caps are usually implemented as OpenType features, so whether they have Unicode code points is mostly irrelevant (there are some Unicode small caps, but not a complete set). Characters with diacritics mostly have their own Unicode code points too and fonts usually include a certain characters already combined, but diacritics can and should also be available as combining characters, meaning you can attach them to the base characters as you wish.

So all you really need is a font that includes the small caps that you need and the combining dot below character. Type your "h", then your dot below combining character, then turn on small caps...

enter image description here

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  • Athough only very few fonts have all the needed characters combining forms are quite rare. Unkess you onlyhave expensive very permium fonts
    – joojaa
    Jul 5, 2017 at 8:20
  • @joojaa true, I just did a quick search and only about 10% of my fonts have the dot below combining char and a lot less than that also have small caps...
    – Cai
    Jul 5, 2017 at 8:45
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It very much depends on the font that you are using. Most fonts don’t have the ḥ and when they do, they often don’t have it with small caps. Brill is one noticeable exception.

My solution, and I work in Adobe InDesign, is to use an extension to InDesign called IndyFont and then I can create an ḥ, including a true small caps version.

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There is a Unicode character for a small capital H. It is U+029C, and displays as ʜ. The Unicode character for a combining dot below is U+0323. To create the desired character, you would type the Unicode character for the small capital H, and then the Unicode character for the combining dot below. It looks like this: ʜ̣

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    Be aware that while Unicode has such characters, they are for other purposes. Also, your solution will only work if you set the table of contents manually, which is a bad idea.
    – Wrzlprmft ♦
    Mar 4, 2020 at 7:10
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    That is true. I realize that I didn't pay attention to the context of the question as to why the ʜ̣ was wanted. They don't actually want a small capital H with a dot below, they want a ḥ that can be displayed as small caps. This can be accomplished by typing a regular lower case h and then a combining dot below (U+0323), which gives you a ḥ. This can then be displayed as small caps.
    – stu
    Mar 5, 2020 at 17:24

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