I read that in math, capital Greek letters should be italic, just like all the other (Latin alphabet) letters. How do I do this? I use \usepackage[charter]{mathdesign} as my font.
[Tex/LaTex] Uppercase greek letters in math in italic/slanted format
greek
Related Solutions
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}
The Latin Modern fonts don't have the full set of Greek letters, but only some of them.
If you need only some Greek words, you can benefit from the ucharclasses package, as shown in the example. If you need longer passages in Greek, it's convenient to load Polyglossia.
\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\usepackage[Latin,Greek]{ucharclasses}
\setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]{Latin Modern Roman}
\newfontfamily{\gfsartemisia}{GFS Artemisia}
\newfontfamily{\gfsbaskerville}{GFS Baskerville}
\newfontfamily{\gfsbodoni}{GFS Bodoni}
\newfontfamily{\gfsdidot}{GFS Didot}
\newfontfamily{\cmu}{CMU Serif}
\newcommand{\greekfont}{\gfsartemisia}
\setTransitionsForLatin{}{}
\setTransitionsForGreek{\begingroup\greekfont}{\endgroup}
\begin{document}
GFS Artemisia -- This text appears fine: ΔπΩε. And again.
\renewcommand{\greekfont}{\gfsbaskerville}
GFS Baskerville -- This text appears fine: ΔπΩε. And again.
\renewcommand{\greekfont}{\gfsbodoni}
GFS Bodoni -- This text appears fine: ΔπΩε. And again.
\renewcommand{\greekfont}{\gfsdidot}
GFS Didot -- This text appears fine: ΔπΩε. And again.
\renewcommand{\greekfont}{\cmu}
CMU Serif --This text appears fine: ΔπΩε. And again.
\end{document}
After you've chosen the font that suits you (maybe experimenting with other Greek fonts), give it directly the name of \greekfont.
Related Question
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Best Answer
According to the manual of
mathdesign,should do.
However, how the uppercase Greek letters should appear is a style decision and there's not a correct way. It mostly depends on the typographic tradition you're following.