Converting greek utf letters to latex symbols

Question

I have a collection of notes on my iPad, written using a markdown editor/viewer (trunk notes) that does not understand latex, but does display greek. Is there a simple way to convert the greek letters (e.g. convert the UTF-8 symbol 0xCEB1, α) to their latex equivalents (\alpha)? I am using pandoc for the conversion, which is pasting a LaTeX header onto the output before conversion to TeX or ConTeXt.

Answer 1

In ConTeXt (both MkIV and MkII with utf-8 encoding), Greek letters work out of the box in text and math mode. (You need a text font with Greek letters)

\starttext
α $α$
\stoptext

With MkIV, Unicode characters behave like ASCII characters, so $\hat α$ is same as $\hat {α}$. In MkII, you need to use the latter form.

Answer 2

I use the following code to make unicode symbols work both as normal text and in mathmode. But then xelatex is needed to compile it:

\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont[Ligatures=TeX]{STIXGeneral}

\def\textalpha{α} \catcode`\α=\active \defα{\relax\ifmmode \alpha \else \textalpha \fi}

Also you need some suitable font, STIX works for me.

If you want to actually replace the unicode characters in the source code, that is a different issue. I don't know what kind of tools are available in your environment. I would compile a list of replacements like α \alpha and then write a small script that executes those in order. E.g. there is the replace utility on linux which does one such replacement.

Answer 3

Expanding Canaaerus answer In xelatex, package unicode-math allows you to use greek characters in math-mode. Check the following minimum example.

\documentclass{article}

% font selection for normal text
\usepackage{fontspec}

% Packages needed for mathematics
\usepackage{amsmath}
\usepackage{unicode-math}

% Fonts
\setmainfont[Mapping=tex-text]{Linux Libertine O}
\setmathfont{XITS Math}

\begin{document}

\begin{equation}
    a = α + b + β^2_i
\end{equation}

\end{document}

For more info (in greek) look here

Fonts

The fonts that you may use are the following ones (they must be installed in your OS' standard font folder)

• Asana-Math. Free font created by Apostolos Syropoulos.
• Stix
• Xits, fork of Stix
• Neo Euler
• Latin Modern Math, OpenType version of the classic TeX font.
• Cambria Math. Proprietary font, distributed with Microsoft software (e.g. MS Office)

Edit

Note though that a and \alpha are different symbols! If you want to convert α to athen the previous approach cannot be used. If that is what you need, then it shouldn't be too difficult to write a script (e.g. in perl or python) that would parse your notes and make the replacements.