I'm looking for an upright Greek font for single Greek characters (like "β-decay" or "µ-metal") which fits to the default CM/latin style, i.e. the upright version of the default italic math mode Greek letters (\beta
, \mu
).
The "default" upright Greek font (should be cbgreek
), which is used when writing with babel
or with the textgreek
package (\textbeta
, \textmu
), doesn't quite fit to the CM/latin font, especially the µ symbol. There are packages replacing the entire font families, e.g. mathdesign
or kpfonts
, providing a complete set of Greek, but none of them was made for CM/latin. upgreek
uses another font for math mode Greek (euler
I guess, also accessible through textgreek
with the respective option) which also doesn't quite fit with CM/latin.
I would already give up if it wasn't for the µ used by the siunitx
package. Its default "micro" prefix (\si{\micro}
) fits perfectly with CM/latin (see comparison below) and I wanted to know whether that µ is just a unique character of the CM font or whether there's a chance to also get an upright β and other letters in exactly that font. Also, how does the siunitx
package get that µ? The characters µ (micro symbol) and μ (greek letter mu) print by default with the same character in cbgreek
with UTF-8 encoding (see below)...
Here's a MWE (pdflatex):
\documentclass{minimal}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage{siunitx}
\usepackage{textgreek}
\usepackage{upgreek}
\begin{document}
m\si{\micro}\textmu $\mu$
\textbeta $\beta$
$\upmu \upbeta$
µμβ % U+00B5 (micro symbol) U+03BC (greek lower case mu) U+03B2 (greek lower case beta)
\end{document}
Result:
cmmi10.tfm
tocmmu10.tfm
and then added the linecmmu10 CMMI10 " -0.25 SlantFont " <cmmi10.pfb
to the map file. To do this properly, one would have to do that for all sizes, plus edit the tfm files to reduce the italic corrections (to 0.0 for most characters), plus prepare the appropriate LaTeX incantations. Thus, it seems possible, although tedious. It gets a little less tedious if one first prepares a tfm with only greek letters.pstricks
to apply the appropriate slant transformation to an occasional character. Unfortunately, I have never usedpstricks
and don't know what it is capable of, except in very general terms.