[Tex/LaTex] Greek symbol fonts in latex

Question

I'm an engineering student currently working on the thesis. I'm using the math font package newtxmath, which generates the greek letter \nu as:

while the symbol font I want is:

I have been trying so hard to find a specific math font which may generate the latter symbol, but I couldn't find one yet. It will be much appreciated if anyone can give me an idea on this. Many thanks in advance!

Edit1:
The code I used for the former example is:

\documentclass[]{book}
\usepackage{newtxmath}

\begin{document}
$\nu$
\end{document}

Edit2: Thanks for the comments and answers! I'm sorry but I cannot leave comments to each comment and answer due to lack of reputations now.
@Ralf Stubner, I just ran pdffonts and the result is attached here (The problem is that I'm not sure which one is the one.. and do we have Times-Roman in latex other than newtxmath & newtxtest? It's curious..):

Edit3: @Cicada, thanks! I think it matches the pdf! Though I have one more thing to ask. I tried your code, but it gave me an error message saying that I need to use LuaTex. Is there any way to get the same result using pdflatex? Thanks in a dvance.

Answer 1

First find the font.

Then, if it is Unicode (U+1D708 is mathematical small nu, i.e. italic), use unicode-math to activate it with setmathfont{}.

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
%\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage{unicode-math}
\setmathfont{STIX Math}
\begin{document}
\Huge
$\nu$
\end{document}

STIX Math is a partial match (for the pointy bit), Latin Modern Math for the angle of the main bar.

=====

It's an italic ordinary nu (U+03BD), in STIX (or XITS).

Italic ordinary lowercase Greek being used for symbols. Does that match your PDF?

MWE

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\pagecolor{red!3}
\usepackage{multicol}
\newcommand\SampleText{\textit{\symbol{"03BD}}}%\symbol{"1D708}}
\newfontfamily\frc{STIX}% Math}
\newfontfamily\fre{XITS}% Math}
\newcommand\printther[2]{{#1\Huge\SampleText} -- #2}
\begin{document}
\begin{multicols}{2}
\printther{\frc}{STIX}

\printther{\fre}{XITS}
\end{multicols}
{\frc \SampleText}
{\fre \SampleText}
\end{document}

=====

My answer is: I recommend using unicode, since that would be the standard nowadays. (How was the source PDF produced, for example - the one with the desired character shape?)

All the rest that follows is more of a minor exploratory footnote than substantive, and not intended as part of my actual answer.

There will be ways to get a character in without using xelatex or lualatex and direct unicode, but I don't know the old-style font encodings. Redefining the \nu macro is another possibility. Or an SE question has answered this already, perhaps. It depends on your context: do you need just one character changed, or a whole font family? And pdflatex only? Sounds like it should be a separate question, to get the best results the quickest.

Expanding on the comments: \usepackage{stix} in pdflatex produces this:

====

Expanding still further, there's a way to access glyphs in old-style fonts (probably multiple ways actually, I would expect).

For pdflatex, there is an italic nu sitting in position x17 in the stix-mathit tfm font metric file, and a more cursive one in the same position in the stix2-mathit tfm.

To use them in math mode, use the \text command from the amsmath package.

You can adjust the size manually.

MWE

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\font\myfont = "stix-mathit" at 36pt
\font\myfontb = "stix2-mathit" at 36pt
\font\myfontc = "stix-mathit" at 12pt
\newcommand\mynu{\text{\myfontc\char"17}}
\begin{document}
\myfont\char"17
\myfontb\char"17

$\text{\myfontc\char"17} = f^{2}$

$\mynu = f^{2}$

\end{document}

Alternatively, no packages at all gives this:

MWE

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\Huge $\nu$
\end{document}

I still recommend unicode, though.