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I have been using texexec which, as I understand it, is mkii. I have several documents that have unicode in them and typeset perfectly using texexec. However, texexec seems to have trouble with metapost and I would like to use mkiv. However, when I use context only a handful of the unicode characters actually typeset, namely the capital greek characters.

Any ideas why? How can I fix this?

Example In the following, the alpha typesets using texexec but not context.

\starttext
  α
\stoptext
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A minimal example is needed. In general, ConTeXt MkIV handles unicode much better than MkII – Aditya Sep 18 '11 at 1:15
@aditya I added an example. – Doug Moore Sep 18 '11 at 1:22

1 Answer

up vote 5 down vote accepted

By default Latin modern fonts are used that do not have lower case greek. Use a full font like Times or Palatino or (if you need a CM look alike) CM Unicode. The following works fine:

\setupbodyfont[times]
\starttext
α
\stoptext
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Actually, that didn't work. Still just a blank page. Any other thoughts? – Doug Moore Sep 18 '11 at 1:46
@Doug: What version of ConTeXt you are using (context --version). For an older version, add \usetypescript[times] before \setupbodyfont. Is there any error message in the log? – Aditya Sep 18 '11 at 2:20
That works. Thanks. Incidentally, what is the current version? – Doug Moore Sep 18 '11 at 2:34
Actually, it only fixed some of the unicode (The greek alphabet). Is there no way to ensure that all unicode typesets? – Doug Moore Sep 18 '11 at 2:57
2  
@Doug: I am using 2011.09.10 version (8 days old), but there was a new release after that. To get the entire unicode alphabet, you need a font that coverts the entire alphabet (none AFAIK). So it depends on what you need. Most fonts have Latin, Greek, and Cyrillic; if you need that along with CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean), you need to set fallback to a different font using the simplefonts module; the same for Arabic; ConTeXt MkIV currently does not support font features of Indic scripts, so if you want that, then you will need to use xetex backend. – Aditya Sep 18 '11 at 4:16
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