UFT8 inside the formula?

Question

Is there a way I can use UFT8 (say greek chars) inside the formula?

For example I want latex to render:

$α$

as

$\alpha$

(actually the question comes from mathjax -- there You can do it, but now I need to use latex -- and I get issues with utf from pdftex).

Answer 1

If you don't want to depend on a specific compiler, you can use the newunicodechar package together with inputenc in the following way:

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{newunicodechar}
\newunicodechar{α}{\alpha}

\begin{document}

$α$

\end{document}

Unfortunately you will have to manually declare every single unicode character that you want to use in this way. The unixode package does this for some common characters. I myself also compiled a list of those characters that I came across until now.

Answer 2

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{unicode-math}

\begin{document}
$α$

\end{document}

Compile this with XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX.