fonts
The designer prefers using mathptmx font for the book, but I really dislike its greek characters. They are larger and bolder than non-greek characters. Do you have any suggestion how to please both the designer and myself? 🙂
Maybe you could suggest another font that looks like Times (New) Roman and does not have this "problem" with greek characters'? Math support is essential.
Use the mathptmx package which supersedes times and provides math support for Times.
\usepackage{mathptmx}
Alternatively, try txfonts for Times in maths. Perhaps have a look at this contribution by frabjous.
\usepackage{txfonts}
upgreek works fine both with XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX. Apparently it isn't clear from chemmacros' documentation though that setting the option greek=upgreek does not load upgreek and greek=textgreek does not load textgreek! The option exists to prevent chemmacros from choosing between upgreek or textgreek automatically if either of them or both are loaded by the user. Using either option without loading the appropriate package usually throws an error like
! Undefined control sequence.
<argument> \textbeta
l.9 \iupac{\b-carotene}
However, when fontspec is loaded, too, the code silently fails with Latin Modern. (I should probably add some checking whether the needed packages are loaded.)
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{upgreek}% needs no be loaded
\usepackage{chemmacros}[2014/01/24]
\usepackage{newunicodechar}
\newunicodechar{β}{\chembeta}
\begin{document}
\iupac{\b-carotene} % works
\iupac{β-carotene} % works
β % works
\chembeta % works
$\beta$ % works fine
\end{document}
Best Answer
txfontsis an alternative.It uses the same fonts for text, but different fonts for math (symbols, greek, etc.)