# Using both a double-story and single-story g in math mode

I am writing some mathematics in which I want to use both typographic variants of the lowercase 'g' in math mode. See the Wikipedia page to see the two variants. There is a single-story and a double-story. I want to use the single-story to denote functions and the double-story to denote metrics on manifolds. Sometimes I want them in bold as well. Since I want them in math mode, bold or not they should be italicized. I can't find any commands like there are to access variants of Greek letters.

More generally I would like to know if there is a general way to access variants in plain text or in math mode, and not just in Computer Modern, because I want to end up typesetting my document with the font Times New Roman or something very similar (I am trying to match the typography in my document to the typography in the book Semi-Riemannian Geometry With Applications to Relativity by Barrett O'Neill.) Right now I am using the package txfonts.

I know already that in Computer Modern, for instance, since the default text 'g' is the double-story and the default math 'g' is the single-story, I could get a double-story 'g' into an equation using \mathrm, but it's not in italics so it looks strange. There must be a better solution.

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most fonts i'm familiar with use the single-story g in italic, and the double-story one in roman; i can't think of any font suitable for math that has both forms in italic. however, computer modern does have a slanted roman, which has the two-story g, so you could use \mathsl{g} for the two-story form. (don't expect to find this for all fonts.) –  barbara beeton May 21 '13 at 19:53

(This is a more-or-less complete re-write of an answer given earlier, after I discovered the varg option of the newtxmath and newpxmath packages.)

You mention that you would like to typeset your document using Times Roman text and math fonts. The newtxmath and newtxtext packages -- much evolved and improved versions of the old txfonts package -- recognize the option varg to specify a "single-story" italic-g math character. In the MWE below, g produces a single-story math-italics "g" character, while \git produces a double-story italics-g character. The "ordinary" (upright, "Roman") g is shown for comparison.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{newtxtext}
\usepackage[varg]{newtxmath}
\newcommand\git{\textit{g}}
\begin{document}
g $\git$ $g$
\end{document}


You may also want to give the packages newpxtext and newpxmath a try. They are of fairly recent vintage, constituting a re-implementation of the pxfonts package which brought the Palatino font family to LaTeX. If you replace the two instances of "newtx" in the MWE above with "newpx", you get the following output:

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