Dot over characters

I'm using pages to write documents in which I need a dot and a bar over various characters such as V̇ and Q̇ and V̄. An upper case V with the dot above renders poorly in pages (appears more like an inverted triangle rather than a dot above). It looks sort of ok in a browser. Similarly the Q̇ shows up as a dot besides Q in pages (more like Q˙ - it seems to show up properly in the browser but it still isn't very obvious. It can easily be missed by a reader who isn't aware that it is supposed to be present).

Is there any way in which I can "raise" the special character higher (dot or overline) ?

This isn't a problem with only these two letters and these two special characters. It seems to be a problem with all upper case letters and all lower case letters which have an upper half. Also appearing on the top right or top left isn't an acceptable solution for me, for at times that can imply a different thing (in the context of my document).

I looked at special characters under the "edit -> special characters" tab. There seem to be many varieties of each special character. I have not tried all but played around with several of them to try and achieve a desired result without much success. Have I missed any solution ? Is this a limitation which I must accept ? I've seen text books in which the dot and bar appear very clearly above the character and is hard to miss. Can I reproduce this with pages ?