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

[George N. White III]

On Tue, May 31, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Tobias Schoel
<liesdiedatei at googlemail.com> wrote:
>
> 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.

If the final document is a pdf that will go on the web you have to
take care that the final pdf avoids composite characters that make
them harder to search (e.g., google fails to find some authors'
names).

Where I work there is an office for a scientific organization that
publishes a report series using LaTeX.   Authors may provide word or
latex sources.  Word docs often have Unicode glyphs for \pi, \alpha,
etc. and it is easier to translate to latex if the Unicode glyphs are
preserved amid the maths markup.  Many authors of LaTeX docs use some
encoding for accented characters in proper names, etc., so again it
would be better to preserve the author's encoding.   In practice this
doesn't yet work because some staff are devoted to WinEDT which does
not yet handle unicode.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia