default italic upper case Greek letters?

[David Carlisle]

On Sun, 23 Apr 2023 at 18:19, Jonathan Fine <jfine2358 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Ulrike
>
> Thank you for your contribution. Here's my minimal example:
>
> \documentclass[12pt]{article}
> \usepackage[math-style=ISO]{unicode-math}
> \begin{document}
> \shipout\hbox{$\Alpha$ $A$}
> \stop
>
> When I look at the PDF, the $\Alpha$ and the $A$ appear to be completely
> identical. I consider this to be a good reason for following plain TeX and
> LaTeX in not defining the command $\Alpha$.
>
> I'd be interested to know why unicode-math does otherwise. I would at
> least expect a warning in the log file.
>

Why would you expect a warning that an explicitly selected style option is
being used?
even if  \Alpha was not defined you could use 𝛢𝐴 as input so both
characters need to be supported.


> By the way, copy and paste from the PDF gives into a Python console gives:
>
> >>> '𝛢𝐴'  # This might get garbled in your mail reader as it's Unicode.
> '𝛢𝐴'
> >>> tuple(map(ord, '𝛢𝐴'))
> (120546, 119860)
> >>>
>

Naturally,  120546  is Alpha, 119860 is  A. The fact that these look the
same is due to history and the font designer. TeX and the unicode-math
package don't have information about glyph shapes. But still it makes sense
to distinguish them in the font and so in the pdf. They may be read
differently, they lower-case differently,  they are different characters
just as 0 and O or l and I are different even though in some fonts the
difference may not be visible.

David



>
> So the two letters 'A' have different code points. They appear to have the
> same glyph.
>
> with kind regards
>
> Jonathan
>
>
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