## Posts Tagged ‘latex’

### Unicode in LaTeX

16/04/2013

The way I type LaTeX has changed significantly in the past couple of months. I now type most of my math formulae in unicode, which makes the source code much more readable.

A few months ago, I might have written

$\lambda/\mu=\kappa/\nu \Rightarrow \exists \Theta,\forall i, \sum_{j\in\mathbb{N}} E[D_{i,j}]=\Theta$

to display

$\lambda/\mu=\kappa/\nu \Rightarrow \exists \Theta,\forall i, \sum_{j\in\mathbb{N}} E[D_{i,j}]=\Theta$.

Now, to type the same equation, my LaTeX source code looks like this:

$λ/μ=κ/ν ⇒ ∃Θ,∀i, ∑_{j∈ℕ} E[D_{i,j}]=Θ$

which produces exactly the same output. The source code is much easier to read; it is also slightly easier to type. Here is how the magic works:

\usepackage[utf8x]{inputenc}
\usepackage{amssymb}
• A number of special characters (including all Greek letters) were already easily available to me because I use a bépo keyboard (if you are a French speaker, you should try it out); otherwise, all characters are available using any keyboard to users of a Unix-like OS thanks to this great .XCompose file. For example, to get ℕ, use the keys Compose+|+N (pretty intuitive, and faster than typing \mathbb{N}). To get ∃, use Compose+E+E; to get ∈, use Compose+i+n, and so on.
• There are two issues with this solution: first, the unicode symbol α maps to \textalpha instead of \alpha; second, the blackboard letters map to \mathbbm instead of \mathbb. This can lead to errors, but I wrote this file which solves the issue by including in the preamble:
\input{greektex.tex}

This is useful for LaTeX, but also for all other places where you might want to type math: thanks to this .XCompose file, typing math in a blog post, tweet or e-mail becomes easy (for example, this is the last blog post where I will use WordPress’ \$latex syntax). And if there ever is a LaTeX formula that you cannot access from your keyboard, you can use a website such as unicodeit.net which converts LaTeX source code to unicode.