[Tex/LaTex] Proper way to use greek letters in an English document

greekmath-modeunicode

I typically use LaTeX to write chemistry & physics documents with a lot of equations. I often will reference terms and variables and such in the text of my document. Typically I just do this by writing $\gamma$ , but someone just pointed out to me that this prevents such characters from being copied out of the resulting PDF. I could go lookup a greek alphabet and past the character into the text file, then italicize it, but this seems painfully slow to say the least. Is there a better way of putting such characters into my document quickly other then using math-mode?

I am already using

\usepackage[UTF8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}

Which is the advise I've seen for making non-math mode text copy correctly.

I'm using PDF(la)TeX if it makes a difference. As the discussion in the comments has shown, I have to specify: I'm on Windows 7, using Adobe Reader X v10.1.1.

Best Answer

One workaround, though ugly, is to use a different PDF reader: It appears the problem is Adobe Reader. I tested this in SumatraPDF v1.8 and text copied from it to Word 2010 and GNU Emacs 23.3.1 (i386-mingw-nt6.1.7601) fine. It didn't copy to notepad++ oddly. When I used the exact same document it left blanks or odd characters in all 3 of those pieces of software.

If anyone has some magic to make Adobe Reader copy it I would love to hear it though, as that is what 90% of people I send my work to will be using.

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] grabbing a single Greek glyph from an alternative font in math mode

You can use a modified version of Importing a single symbol from a different font

\usepackage[T3,T1]{fontenc}
\makeatletter
\newcommand\ipamathsymbol[2][\mathord]{%
  #1{\@ipamathsymbol{#2}}}
\def\@ipamathsymbol#1{\mathchoice
  {\@ipam@thsymbol{#1}\tf@size}
  {\@ipam@thsymbol{#1}\tf@size}
  {\@ipam@thsymbol{#1}\sf@size}
  {\@ipam@thsymbol{#1}\ssf@size}}
\def\@ipam@thsymbol#1#2{%
  \mbox{\fontsize{#2}{#2}\usefont{T3}{cmr}{m}{sl}\symbol{#1}}}
\makeatother
\renewcommand{\gamma}{\ipamathsymbol{71}}

Loading the T3 encoding is necessary, since the tipa fonts are available only in that encoding. Change T1 in OT1 if the latter is your default encoding. I've left the entire infrastructure rather than defining a one shot command, so one can play with other symbols as well; \ipamathsymbol has an optional argument (the math kind of the symbol, default \mathord) and the mandatory argument is the slot number of the chosen glyph.

[Tex/LaTex] Define particle names to use upright greek letters in math mode

As others have said in their answers there are a number of packages that provide upright Greek letters, e.g., upgreek, textgreek, kpfonts, fourier, newtxmath, ... which one to choose is in my eyes mainly a design question: which one fits best to the document's main font?

Since in chemistry upright Greek letters are used in a number of different places (particle symbols such as in your question, IUPAC names, ...) the chemgreek package defines a number of mappings for those different packages to macros \chemalpha, \chembeta, etc. (48 in total) and also allows to define own mappings. It does not load any of those packages so the choice is still up to the user. The advantage is that chemmacros (or other chemistry packages like mhchem) can simply use the \chem<letter> commands internally and the corresponding output will match the choice made by the user.

This can be used to define particle macros yourself:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

% three different packages for demonstration purposes:
\usepackage{upgreek}
\usepackage{textgreek}
\usepackage{kpfonts}

\usepackage{chemmacros}[2014/01/24]% loads `chemgreek'

% just to overwrite kpfonts as default font:
\usepackage{lmodern}

% define the particles; the second argument is placed in`chemformula's \chcpd
% command
% the negative space before the `e' should be chosen depending on the actual
% choice:
\NewChemParticle{\eneutrino}{\chemnu_{$\!\!e$}}
\NewChemParticle{\belectron}{\chembeta-}
\NewChemParticle{\bpositron}{\chembeta+}

\newcommand*\pkg[1]{\textsf{#1}}

\begin{document}

\selectchemgreekmapping{upgreek}
\pkg{upgreek}: \eneutrino\ \belectron\ \bpositron

\selectchemgreekmapping{textgreek}
\pkg{textgreek}: \eneutrino\ \belectron\ \bpositron

\selectchemgreekmapping{kpfonts}
\pkg{kpfonts}: \eneutrino\ \belectron\ \bpositron

\end{document}

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Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] grabbing a single Greek glyph from an alternative font in math mode

[Tex/LaTex] Define particle names to use upright greek letters in math mode

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