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I'm writing an essay in which I need the greek letters to be upright. I have fixed this by applying the accepted solution given to this question. I quote from that solution:

\documentclass{minimal}

\usepackage[greek,english]{babel}

\begin{document}

\greektext A whole paragraph in greek letters \latintext

\end{document}

However, when i try to write the letter phi, by using the Latin letter f, I get a version of phi that I don't want. It looks kinda like this enter image description here (only upright) but I want it to look like this enter image description here (only upright) which is the version I get when I use the standard \phi within the math environment.

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Speldosa
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  • A tip: If you indent lines by 4 spaces, then they are marked as a code sample. You can also highlight the code and click the "code" button (with "{}" on it). – Andrey Vihrov Aug 08 '11 at 15:07
  • Have you tried XeLaTeX? It works with Unicode and is a lot better at multilingual typesetting. – Andrey Vihrov Aug 08 '11 at 15:14
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    A brief look at the documentation of cbgreek reveals it has no such letter (a variant of normal phi) defined. The LGR encoding used in \greektext does not make letters active, so one cannot do something like \let\textphi\textvarphi either. – eudoxos Aug 08 '11 at 15:45
  • @Andrey Vihrov, thanks for the tip. I'll try to keep that in mind for next time I'll post. Also, I'll look into XeTeX. – Speldosa Aug 08 '11 at 17:33
  • @eudoxos Oh, so cbgreek is something else than the greek alphabet that is used in the math environment? – Speldosa Aug 08 '11 at 17:33
  • @Speldosa oh yes, those are separately designed fonts! (In unicode, there is also a number of "phi" letters, some meant as symbols and some as letters) Being no expert in greek typesetting, I would just assume that what you ask for simply does not commonly exist at all, since no documents (e.g. one on cbgreek) seem even to mention it. – eudoxos Aug 09 '11 at 07:50

3 Answers3

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I don't think there is any way to do this via babel-interpreted keyboard input, at least not without serious hacking.

Now, if you're typesetting actual Greek, I would recommend simply going with the loopy phi. That's what's used in Greek writing.

If, however, you're typesetting Greek letters for science or math, there are some packages that provide an upright variant phi:

  • upgreek (Euler or Adobe Symbol): $\upphi$
  • txfonts (Times-like): $\phiup$
  • pxfonts (Palatino-like): $\phiup$

If you need these letters a lot, you could define marcos for them with shorter names. For other upright Greek letters from these packages, see The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List.

Another option would be looking for a font that has the variant you like (Don't know if that exists, cf. above) and using that, probabaly with XeLaTeX. For XeLaTeX, however, you should use polyglossia instead of babel. Then again, if you're using XeLaTeX already, you might as well just directly put in one of the phis available in Unicode: ϕφɸ. But since this would mean a lot of copy-and-pasting, this might miss your point entirely because you seem to be looking for a comfortable way of typing in Greek letters.

doncherry
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  • I'm just seeing that basically everything I'm saying has been said in the question you linked, but better and more detailed. Then I'm afraid, the only thing I can contribute here is my first two paragraphs. Generally, The distinction between Greek text (with babel) and Greek letters/symbols in science and math (with e.g. $\upphi$) is in line with the semantic markup that's typical of LaTeX. – doncherry Aug 08 '11 at 15:50
  • Thanks for the info. I'll look into what you told me (along with checking out the question I linked to) and get back here afterwards. For clarity, what I want to do is to include greek letters in a couple of instances in the text to describe some concepts that I've defined with help of greek letters. – Speldosa Aug 08 '11 at 17:39
  • Ok, I've checked out txfonts out now and they will do for the greek letters. However, I don't want to change anything else in my document. I only want the txfonts when it comes to greek letters as regular text (I'm happy with the way it looks in the math environment). Could somebody maybe give me a hint to how I should do this because I'm not entirely sure how to do it on my own. – Speldosa Aug 08 '11 at 18:05
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    @Speldosa: Then I'd definitely recommend forgetting about the babel part and using math upright Greek letters. Here's some info about changing the font for a certain paragraph/sentence, about changing the math font (which will change all equations), and here's how to find out the cryptic names of your fonts. TeX.sx knows everything :). – doncherry Aug 08 '11 at 18:52
  • I was pretty sure there were some info about this to on SE. Thanks for referring me to the right threads. I'll come back here and mark your answer as accepted as soon as I get it to work :) – Speldosa Aug 08 '11 at 19:16
  • Well, it seems that what I will have to do is to temporally switch the font of the math environment since I want to use math symbols within the txfonts package (but at the same time, I don't want to change the default font for the math environment). This seems hard :S – Speldosa Aug 08 '11 at 23:14
  • @Speldosa: I have to admit I don't have a clue how to do this, I virtually never use math since my field of study doesn't deal with any of that. I suggest you check out if there's a question on this already, and if not, something along the lines of "How to change the font of part of an equation" sounds like a good new question. Sorry I can't be of any more help here. – doncherry Aug 08 '11 at 23:26
  • I'm on it. Thanks for all your help. I found the following thread: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/14570/change-math-font-only-in-some-parts-of-a-document. I'll see if I can decipher it :) – Speldosa Aug 08 '11 at 23:29
  • Could I just ask something for clarity before I mess this up? Is the loopy phi (which is varphi in maths mode) equivalent to the non-loopy phi (which is phi in maths mode) as far as Greek text is concerned? That is, if OED uses the non-loopy phi, can I substitute the loopy phi without changing the word I'm typesetting? (You can tell how much Greek I know...) In case it matters, I'm specifically dealing with Ancient Greek. Just if I could just use the loopy one, that would be a whole lot easier...! – cfr May 25 '14 at 03:15
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So, I just happend to run over a solution that worked perfectly for me.

By placing \usepackage[varg]{txfonts} in the preamble, I get the times font for the text and txfonts for the math environment, typesetted in a way that looks estethically pleasing. When I just changed the math environment individually to txfonts it didn't look anything like this. Don't ask me why, I'm clueless, but at least it worked.

I found the package in this list over free math fonts: ftp://ctan.tug.org/tex-archive/info/Free_Math_Font_Survey/survey.html.

Speldosa
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    Cool. I just found this question (and some questions linked to it), which might help if you still wanted to try the other way round. – doncherry Aug 09 '11 at 09:06
  • Thanks, I'll save those questions as references if I want to do something similar later. For the time being, this solution fits me perfectly though so there's no reason to change it. – Speldosa Aug 09 '11 at 09:49
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If you use the tipa phonetic symbols font, you can use \textphi to get the upright phi that you so desire, although it is in bold face, and appears to be the capital letter for phi.

If you use the wsuipa phonetic symbols font, you can use \niphi to also get the upright phi, except that it is not in bold face.

The fonts that support upright Greek letters, however, are txfonts/pxfonts and upgreek Upright Greek Letters fonts, respectively. With the txfonts/pxfonts font, there are two variants for phi, namely \phiup and \varphiup. With the upgreek font, they are \upphi and \upvarphi, respectively.

Bill
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