[XeTeX] Typesetting Greek mathematical text using Unicode

[d fulano]

I am trying to re-typeset a 200-page mathematics textbook using LaTeX / XeLaTeX. 


The original was produced over 15 years ago using LaTeX (2.09 perhaps). The original files were long lost, however we from jpg scans of all the pages -- and a day using Tesseract-OCR  -- we were able to extract all the text in Unicode UTF8 with over 99% accuracy. 


The book is written in Greek, with almost no pictures (purely text). The text is almost entirely Greek, with very few English words (e.g. names such as Euler etc).  It has a lot of maths, which are mostly Greek letters also. 


 

My problem is on a method to produce Greek mathematical  letters by typing them directly from a Greek keyboard. I.e., I want to be able to say $β$ and obtain the same as $\beta$.  Apart from the fact that I suspect that this was the method used in the original typesetting, it is also difficult to convert all the formula now into \alpha s etc  because the text has been ocr and the math formulas are in greek Unicode text. 


At the moment, the only possibility that I found that works is using:


\documentclass[a4paper,10pt]{book}
\usepackage{amsfonts}
\usepackage[utf8x,math]{inputenx}
\usepackage[greek]{babel}
\PreloadUnicodePage{3}
\usepackage{amsthm}

 

However, this relies on the unsupported files < inmpath.sty > and < ix-math.cfg >


Q . Is there another (better) way to achieve this perhaps using XeLaTeX ??


Q. I have seen the package < unicode-math.sty > but it is also experimental, I'd prefer something 'more robust' if possible. Moreover, it also seems an overkill, as I don't care to be able to typeset an arbitrary Unicode math symbol, just the 20 or so Greek letters that appear in the book [though they appear thousands of times..]  Are there any primitive commands perhaps that I could put in the preamble to define these few greek keyboard letters so that I can use them in math mode without any package?? Ie, a way to translate β into \beta ? 


 

Q. Also, I'm having trouble with the fonts.. I like the feel of the CB greek fonts and they work OK with this book, however I'm happy to try alternate fonts options.   But the problem I have is that I need a font where the numbers appear the same in text or math, if this is possible.  In many fonts I looked the output of $2$ looks different than 2, which I prefer not to have. Are there any good alternatives to CB greek fonts?  If not, can I get cbgreek to work with XeLaTeX? (the above code works only with latex at the moment). 

 

 

Many thanks