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I have noticed that with Minion Pro font v and \nu are indistinguishable.

Does anyone know a decent workaround to this?

Somewhere in the web it was suggested to use \upsilon as a substitute for v. It's a bit irritating, however: You lose \upsilon and w and v will look too different.

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Welcome to TeX.sx! – Martin Scharrer♦ Jun 30 '11 at 17:11
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J. This is really a font issue: that is the design of the font. The work-around is to pick a different font! – Joseph Wright♦ Jun 30 '11 at 19:43
@Joseph Wright: You are right. However, I wouldn't like to let go of Minion completely. I'm looking for (1) a way to replace v and w (or \nu) with something else and (2) a good choice of "something else". Here the point (2) is more important for me. (Point (1) is probably relatively easy.) – J. J. Jul 1 '11 at 3:55
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J. My point is that this is really not a TeX question, it's about typography. Quite apart from that, fonts are designed 'as a whole'. If the font you choose has poor glyphs for your use case, this suggests it's the wrong font for the job in hand. – Joseph Wright♦ Jul 1 '11 at 5:17
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@Joseph Wright: Yes, this is not a TeX question. I was however under impression that this might still be an acceptable question for this site. (Judging from previous questions like this one: tex.stackexchange.com/questions/9533/… ) Sorry if I was wrong! – J. J. Jul 1 '11 at 6:08

1 Answer

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This seems to have been solved by Johannes Küster in his MnMath. See for example this presentation by him on page 11, where he shows a redesigned math italic "v" and "w".

However MnMath is not cheap (around 700€ for the complete set) compared to free for MnSymbol.

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Interesting. I wonder how hard would it be to add (and design) alternative v and w for MnSymbol. (Using them could be optional for the user.) – J. J. Jul 1 '11 at 17:17
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If you can get those glyphs designed, then adding them as optional math symbols should be relatively easy to do (see for example how the MinionPro package implements the [openg] option to switch to open g for mathmode). – Lev Bishop Jul 1 '11 at 18:14

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