[XeTeX] Greek (and other Unicode) letters in math mode

[Tobias Schoel]

Am 31.05.2011 21:47, schrieb Gerrit:
> Am 31.05.2011 21:27, schrieb Apostolos Syropoulos:
>> I think you should use package unicode-math and one of the few OpenType
>>
>> fonts that include a MATH table to achieve what you are asking. In
>> different
>>
>> words, what you ask is already here! Not to mention that this
>> capability can be
>>
>> enabled even in LaTeX by loading the package elmath:
>>
>> http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/elmath
>>
>> A.S.
>>
> Oh, great, thank you! Sometimes I am really surprised what is already
> there. :-)
> I’ll give it a try - although if the freely available Opentype fonts are
> not as beautiful as cmr...?

Asana Math looks really beautiful (at least to mee, ;-)), else you could 
wait for Linux Libertine with Math support.
>
> Am 31.05.2011 21:28, schrieb Arno Trautmann:
>> With a good keyboard layout, one can have most mathematical symbol at
>> hand; on mine (the Neo layout¹) I have all greek characters as well as
>> ∏, ∑, ∫ and many others …
>
> Well, I enhanced my keyboard layout as well, but usually it is not as
> convenient as to write it out. When I have to press AltGr+Shift + some
> other keys at the same time to get α, I think it is easier to just type
> \alpha.

And that is one reason, why TeX uses \alpha: Most people write „\alpha“ 
faster than some „strange“ 5th-level key.

Usually, it is not that often that I need Greek letters, so that
> they don’t warrant a special key.
> (by the way, I’m still wondering why there is no input method like the
> Japanese one for latin based scripts... in Japanese, you just type
> “alpha” and you can select α from a list. If that would be available for
> alphabetic languages, you could put almost every character on the
> keyboard without having to have 5 levels on the keyboard...

It does exist. Ibus has a LaTeX-input-method which transforms 
„\rightarrow“ to „→“. I seldom use it, so I don't know, which symbols 
are supported.

>
> Well, either way, thank you both. I’ll just give it a try :)
>
> Gerrit

Last thing to say: Unicode is not designed to correctly express complex 
mathematical formulae, but TeX is. (There are also attempts of linear 
nearly plain unicode text math encodings, e.g. by Sargant Murray.) So 
use TeX.


ciao

Toscho