I have a collection of notes on my iPad, written using a markdown editor/viewer (trunk notes) that does not understand latex, but does display greek. Is there a simple way to convert the greek letters (e.g. convert the UTF-8 symbol 0xCEB1, α) to their latex equivalents (\alpha)? I am using pandoc for the conversion, which is pasting a LaTeX header onto the output before conversion to TeX or ConTeXt.
[Tex/LaTex] Converting greek utf letters to latex symbols
greekunicode
Related Solutions
If you just need a few words, then a simple approach can solve your problem:
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[LGR,T1]{fontenc}
\newcommand{\textgreek}[1]{\begingroup\fontencoding{LGR}\selectfont#1\endgroup}
\begin{document}
physics (from ancient greek \textgreek{f'usis})
\end{document}
For longer passages, perhaps loading the polutoniko option with babel may be recommended. Check in the documentation of babel for the translitteration scheme used.
You may also choose different fonts for Greek (the GFS fonts support many of them).
Update
With recent and uptodate TeX distributions, one can also input directly the Greek characters:
% -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[LGR,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc} % utf8 is required
\newcommand{\textgreek}[1]{\begingroup\fontencoding{LGR}\selectfont#1\endgroup}
\begin{document}
physics (from ancient greek \textgreek{φύσις})
\end{document}
If you can use unicode-enabled engines such as XeTeX or LuaTeX, you can simply add the greek letter ρ into the document.
If you stick to tex of pdftex as engines, you can find a way by the inputenc package, for example here you can find some help.
In all cases, \(\rho\) or $\rho$ will give you a ρ in italics. If you need in upright shape, you can use the upgreek package for that.
Best Answer
In ConTeXt (both MkIV and MkII with utf-8 encoding), Greek letters work out of the box in text and math mode. (You need a text font with Greek letters)
With MkIV, Unicode characters behave like ASCII characters, so
$\hat α$is same as$\hat {α}$. In MkII, you need to use the latter form.