[Tex2002ans]

You may also want to check out the fonts mentioned in this Source Code Pro bug:

#205: "ḃ and ḋ (b & d with dot above)"

Some of the users mentioned 10 fonts with those Gaelic characters. Perhaps they also have a stylistic dotless i.

Originally Posted by Jellby

There's also a specific dotless i character that is used in Turkish at least, you could use any font that supports it and replace all your i's with ı's (although it will probably break searching, etc.) If modifying a font, you could just replace the "i" glyph with the "ı", which should be even simpler than removing the dot.

Searching for some more info on this, I stumbled upon this answer in the Unicode Mail List:

"Re: Irish dotless I"

Irish has no distinction between a dotted or undotted glyph representation of the vowel i...

So which ever character is encoded does not matter as they will be perceived as equivalent by Irish readers. If one creates a Irish document using the dotless i, it won't break the Irish orthograph, and there's a way to use a custom folding rule for Irish to use any of these two characters.

Because of that, an application may as well use a Gaelic font where the soft-dotted 'i' is shown without the dot, or mutate every soft-dotted 'i' into dotless 'i' before rendering with any other font.

In both cases, there's apparently no need to add a new character or diacritic to preserve a linguistic distinction, or to render Irish with either the modern or traditional Gaelic styles...

And the Wikipedia page on "Dotted and dotless I":

Usage in other languages

[...]

The dotless ı may also be used as a stylistic variant of the dotted i, without there being any meaningful difference between them. This is common in Irish, for example, but is considered simply an omission of the tittle rather than a separate letter.

Based on this, I wouldn't insert the actual dotless character.

Perhaps as Jellby said, apply the new style via OpenType, or create an embedded font with the dotless overwriting the normal 'i' slot.

Side Note: This solution is probably the right one for Text-to-Speech (TTS) as well.

Originally Posted by Quoth

Both modern Gaelic (and old stuff) and Hebrew use a symbol like a cross between a 1 and 7 for the & symbol which in English is Et and used to be listed after z. The Irish is closer to a 7 than a 1 and the Hebrew & is actually their letter Vav.

You've read the fantastic "Shady Characters" book/blog, correct?

"The Ampersand, Part 1 of 2"
"The Ampersand, Part 2 of 2"
"The Ampersand, Part 2½ of 2"