I'm looking for a workaround for a line spacing problem. I'm editing a medieval Latin manuscript page, and it's full of abbreviations. So, for instance, the word "in" is abbreviated as i with a bar over it, ī.
This is no problem, because ī is in the unicode character set. But there are many of these abbreviations that are not. For example, "quae" is abbreviated q with an overbar. That's not in the unicode character set, at least that I can find anywhere.
Unicode has a solution for this; it's the "Combining diacritical marks" character set. So a q can be combined with an overbar to give q̅. That's two characters, note, even though it looks like one -- copy it and backspace over it and you'll see.

Using the Combining diacriticals is a perfectly workable solution, except that, when I enter my q̅, NisusWriter suddenly ups the line spacing dramatically -- from about 14 point (on 12 point type) to around 18 point. I can manually set the leading to 14 point -- but if I do that, then NisusWriter (in effect) raises the text about three points above the proper baseline. And if I put this text in a table cell, it still gives me an 18 point high table cell even when the leading is reduced to 14 point.
I need to be able to put the literal text, e.g. q̅, in parallel with the proper text, e.g. quae. I can't have one with the baseline way above the other. Is there an easy way to do this, or am I going to have to format every line with manual leading, baseline shifts, table cell heights, etc.
I've attached a sample showing the problem. It's the last line of the table, which is highlighted in red. There are other examples in the cells above that.