Diacritic for inter-consonantal vocalic r

[Andrew Glass]

Dear Dr. Bhattacharya,

> I just like to know the position in the West regarding the available computer font packages,
> particularly if authors have to help the press in developing the character with subscript ring
> below.

R with ring below was not included in the Unicode standard, and there
is no expectation that it will ever have a dedicated code point.
Instead, the proper method for creating r with a ring below is to use
a plain r followed by the combining ring below character (U+0325),
e.g., r̥. OpenType font technology permits font designers to
reposition and substitute combinations of signs to achieve an
aesthetic shape for display and printing. Therefore, if you wish to
use an r with a ring below in a publication, you would be advised to
choose both a suitable font (e.g., Gandhari Unicode), and suitable
software which is capable of supporting OpenType features (InDesign,
Word 2003, Mellel, Abiword). Open Office does not support OpenType
features and does not recognize fonts with the otf suffix.

Both units of this symbol can be mapped to a single keyboard sequence,
so that the user need not be aware that the sign consists of two
codes.

Some presses insist on using in-house fonts, in which case it should
be their responsibility to support particular glyphs. Other presses
permit the author to make a suitable choice. Commercial fonts are
getting better at supporting the diacritics needed for Indology, but
full OpenType support for r with ring below may not be a high priority
(or even on the roadmap) for most commercial font vendors. Thank fully
there are other options some of which have been discussed on this list
in the last few days.

Andrew Glass