How to use Greek letters (in a presentation)

Question

I would like to include the following line from Wikipedia in a presentation:

στεγανός steganós ‚bedeckt‘ und γράφειν gráphein ‚schreiben‘

But I am unable to convince pdflatex to include the greek letters. I have already tried to use (from: Greek in LaTeX)

\usepackage[german,greek]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
...
\latintext
...
\textgreek{στεγανός} steganós ‚bedeckt‘

which printed the Latin text just fine, but the Greek text was not set at all. I would like to avoid using

$\sigma\tau\epsilon...$

if possible. I should also mention that I would like to achieve this with TeX Live-only packages.

Note that german is alte Rechtschreibung (old orthographic rules). For the current neue Rechtschreibung (new orthographic rules) use ngerman. — doncherry, Oct 25 '11 at 20:10

score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 25 '11 at 10:48

3

Use

\usepackage{ucs}
\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage[greek,german]{babel}

If German is your main language, it should be specified last, avoiding the need to say \latintext. The main font family should have support for the Greek alphabet; without a minimal example it's hard to tell if it's the case.

answered Oct 25 '11 at 10:48

egreg

1,121,712

I wouldn't use ucs/utf8x. My advice would be to get an actual lgrenc.dfu which can be used with the standard \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}, see also this discussion: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/18572/how-can-i-write-greek-in-texniccenter-with-miktex – Ulrike Fischer Oct 25 '11 at 13:05
@UlrikeFischer I know about utf8x not being the most up-to-date way of dealing with UTF-8 encoded documents; unfortunately no lgrenc.dfu is still in TeX Live and requires manual intervention for installing it. For simple documents utf8x and ucs work well. I'd endorse requests for getting lgrenc.dfu into TeX Live and other distributions. – egreg Oct 25 '11 at 13:12

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited Apr 13 '17 at 12:34

As Matsaya pointed out: \textgreek{stegan'os} works as well. This command takes an argument in Latin letters and converts them to their Greek "counterparts" according to this overview. You don't have to enter actual Greek letters, which usually is more convenient. In your case, you already had the Greek letters from Wikipedia.

So for your example, I'd recommend the following setup:

\documentclass{beamer}

\usepackage[greek,ngerman]{babel}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

\usepackage{lmodern}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}

\begin{document}

\textgreek{stegan'os} steganós bedeckt

\end{document}

ngerman is assuming you're using the new othography. lmodern and fontenc provide you with a high-quality font (Latin Modern) that looks about the same as the standard LaTeX font, Computer Modern, see Latin Modern vs cm-super?.

How to use Greek letters (in a presentation)

2 Answers2

Linked

Related