# Proper way to use greek letters in an English document

I typically use LaTeX to write chemistry & physics documents with a lot of equations. I often will reference terms and variables and such in the text of my document. Typically I just do this by writing $\gamma$, but someone just pointed out to me that this prevents such characters from being copied out of the resulting PDF. I could go lookup a greek alphabet and past the character into the text file, then italicize it, but this seems painfully slow to say the least. Is there a better way of putting such characters into my document quickly other then using math-mode?

\usepackage[UTF8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}


Which is the advise I've seen for making non-math mode text copy correctly.

I'm using PDF(la)TeX if it makes a difference. As the discussion in the comments has shown, I have to specify: I'm on Windows 7, using Adobe Reader X v10.1.1.

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If I copy the result of $\gamma$ and paste it into a Unicode savvy editor, I get a γ (see?). No special trick. The string utf8 for inputenc should be lowercase, but this is not relevant for the question: it may work on Windows, but may also give problems on other platforms. –  egreg Sep 28 '11 at 22:05
Btw. originally it was a comment to Problem copying text from LaTeX PDF - special characters. –  Stefan Kottwitz Sep 28 '11 at 22:08
@egreg I just realized the problem with your answer: The reason I asked the question is that Greek letters I put in with math mode don't copy. Someone wanted to send me some revisions to something I wrote, and are not a LaTeX user, so they pasted it into word. All the Greek characters disappeared. I've tried it in notepad++ and Firefox and get a newline, and emacs gives ^M^@. So your solution, creative as it is, will not work. –  Canageek Sep 28 '11 at 23:33
@Canageek On Mac OS X it works very cleanly. Using italic Greek is not a solution, as the font won't have the correct parameters for math typesetting. –  egreg Sep 28 '11 at 23:40
@Canageek: Maybe the problem is that the font used doesn't have greek characters on your colleague's computer? –  ℝaphink Sep 29 '11 at 6:06