Advice on Greek (Symbol) fonts and characters

By Jeremy Harbinson at Mon, Nov 20 2006 8:35am |

Hi,
I have just started using a Mac and I have not so far been able to find a way of producing 'nice' symbols (Greek characters) for text, graph axis legends etc.

I used to use a Latex a lot and the MathPazo font was (IMHO) a source of elegant symbols that matched the form of Palatino characters beautifully. I suppose ideally I would like to able to continue using symbols that had the same style as the roman characters. Latexit does offer this, but this is solution is bit cumbersome for routine use.

So far the only source of Greek symbols that I have encountered are the various Greek fonts (eg MMaGreek etc) which have a very different look to the typical roman character sets. Also these Greek fonts are not so easy to use (m, for example, does not enter a 'mu', as it does on the Symbol font used by OS/2, Windows etc).

So, can anyone give me some advice on how best to get nice Greek characters into text. I apologize in advance for posing what to an experienced Apple user may be an trivial question, but after 15 years of MS Win and 10 years of OS/2 I am still fixed in a certain mindset.

all the best,
Jeremy Harbinson

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Mon, 2006-11-20 09:38 — dgohara

Re: Advice on Greek (Symbol) fonts and characters

Hi Jeremy,

You might want to check out the Character Palette that comes with OS X. I just looked quickly and there are options for selecting Greek fonts (and if you open the little disclosure triangle in the lower left hand corner it will present more font options). The instructions for activating the character palette are (from Mac Help):

You can use Keyboard Viewer to see where characters are located on keyboards used for other languages. For example, you can see how the keys on an Italian keyboard are laid out.

Choose Apple menu > System Preferences and click International.
Click Input Menu, then select the checkbox next to Keyboard Viewer.
Select the On checkbox next to the language whose keyboard layout you want to use.
Choose Show Keyboard Viewer from the Input menu on the right side of the menu bar (the one that looks like a flag).
To see the keyboard layout for a different language, choose its keyboard layout from the Input menu.
You can also use the Character Palette to see and type characters used in different languages.

Hope that helps,

Dave

Wed, 2009-07-22 16:42 — Ikaria

I think you should use the

I think you should use the option of Character Pallete. I have used those and it really helped me lot. The procedure to activate the options of character pallete is available in the Mac Help option.
I think this will solve your problem. One more way is to install the some newer version of Greek fonts. I think the latest versions of Greek fonts will be sufficient for you.

Ikaria