How to access the Greek letters of a particular font?

Question

I have a problem acessing the Greek letters of a particular font – for instance of the font TeX Gyre Pagella. I checked with the program Fontforge that this font has Greek letters. But when I try something like this:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[LGR]{fontenc}
\usepackage[greek]{babel}
\usepackage{tgpagella}

\begin{document}
κφγ φγψ ψγκφ ααηχ  

\end{document}

I get as a result the Greek letters in the standard font, with the message:

LaTeX Font Warning: Some font shapes were not available, defaults substituted.

I know of course that I could use LuaLaTeX but I have to stick to pdftex because of the kerning and spacing feature of the microtype package and because LuaLaTeX compiles too slow on my old machine.

Answer 1

TeX Gyre Pagella does not support Greek. This is true of the opentype fonts as well as the type1 variants. It is true that the fonts include Greek glyphs but these do not constitute support for typesetting Greek text. Many fonts, especially those designed to support mathematics, include some Greek characters even though they are not designed to typeset Greek text.

Here are the scripts supported by the opentype regular font from TeX Gyre Pagella:

DFLT            Default
cyrl            Cyrillic
latn            Latin
latn.AZE        Latin/Azeri
latn.CRT        Latin/Crimean Tatar
latn.MOL        Latin/Moldavian
latn.NLD        Latin/Dutch
latn.PLK        Latin/Polish
latn.ROM        Latin/Romanian
latn.TRK        Latin/Turkish

You can test opentype fonts for support using otfinfo. For example, the above output was obtained using

otfinfo -s fonts/opentype/public/tex-gyre/texgyrepagella-regular.otf 

I do not know which version of MinionPro you have or whether it supports Greek but, again, the mere inclusion of some Greek characters does not establish whether it supports typesetting Greek text.

For type1 fonts, you can look for font definition files in the relevant encoding. For example, tex/latex/gfsbodoni/ includes the following files:

gfsbodoni.sty  lgrbodoni.fd  ot1bodoni.fd  t1bodoni.fd  ubodoninums.fd

The first, gfsbodoni.sty is the LaTeX package you might call with \usepackage{gfsbodoni} in your document. The others are font definition (.fd) files. The first part of the name tells you the encoding the file supports:

• lgr -> LGR
• ot1 -> OT1
• t1 -> T1
• u -> unencoded/raw - usually this would be a symbol font without a standard encoding.

So we can see that GFS Bodoni's package supports Greek as well as the languages supported by the T1 and OT1 encodings and probably has some special symbols as well.

In contrast, this is what we find in tex/latex/tex-gyre/:

il2qag.fd   l7xqbk.fd   ly1qcr.fd   ot1qcs.fd   ot4qhv.fd     qxqag.fd      t1qag.fd   t5qbk.fd        tgchorus.sty   ts1qhv.fd
il2qbk.fd   l7xqcr.fd   ly1qcs.fd   ot1qhv.fd   ot4qhvc.fd    qxqbk.fd      t1qbk.fd   t5qcr.fd        tgcursor.sty   ts1qhvc.fd
il2qcr.fd   l7xqcs.fd   ly1qhv.fd   ot1qhvc.fd  ot4qpl.fd     qxqcr.fd      t1qcr.fd   t5qcs.fd        tgheros.sty    ts1qpl.fd
il2qcs.fd   l7xqhv.fd   ly1qhvc.fd  ot1qpl.fd   ot4qtm.fd     qxqcs.fd      t1qcs.fd   t5qhv.fd        tgpagella.sty  ts1qtm.fd
il2qhv.fd   l7xqhvc.fd  ly1qpl.fd   ot1qtm.fd   ot4qzc.fd     qxqhv.fd      t1qhv.fd   t5qhvc.fd       tgschola.sty   ts1qzc.fd
il2qhvc.fd  l7xqpl.fd   ly1qtm.fd   ot1qzc.fd   qbookman.sty  qxqhvc.fd     t1qhvc.fd  t5qpl.fd        tgtermes.sty
il2qpl.fd   l7xqtm.fd   ly1qzc.fd   ot4qag.fd   qcourier.sty  qxqpl.fd      t1qpl.fd   t5qtm.fd        ts1qag.fd
il2qtm.fd   l7xqzc.fd   ot1qag.fd   ot4qbk.fd   qpalatin.sty  qxqtm.fd      t1qtm.fd   t5qzc.fd        ts1qbk.fd
il2qzc.fd   ly1qag.fd   ot1qbk.fd   ot4qcr.fd   qswiss.sty    qxqzc.fd      t1qzc.fd   tgadventor.sty  ts1qcr.fd
l7xqag.fd   ly1qbk.fd   ot1qcr.fd   ot4qcs.fd   qtimes.sty    qzapfcha.sty  t5qag.fd   tgbonum.sty     ts1qcs.fd

The relevant font definition files for TeX Gyre Pagella are these:

• il2qpl.fd -> Czech & Slovak ??
• l7xqpl.fd -> Lithuanian
• ly1qpl.fd -> 'texnansi' encoding (Latin but has free slots, unlike T1, and so excludes some characters covered by that encoding)
• ot1qpl.fd -> OT1
• ot4qpl.fd -> Polish ??
• qxqpl.fd -> 'GUST' encoding (Latin)
• t1qpl.fd -> T1
• t5qpl.fd -> Vietnamese
• ts1qpl.fd -> 'text companion' encoding (text symbols as provided by Computer Modern e.g. old style numerals accessed by special commands, copyright and trademark symbols, additional currency symbols etc.)

As you can see, the existence of Greek glyphs in the font does not establish support for Greek as a language, whether using type1 or opentype fonts.

And, of course, in many cases, package documentation will give you a quicker answer to questions about coverage than examining the font definition files. Still, not all fonts are documented or fully documented so understanding how to determine this by examining the package contents itself may be helpful.

If the glyphs were there, you could create support files for using them. (The autoinst method mentioned by Tim S. is one such method though I don't know anything about its support for Greek.) In this case, however, the problem is a lack of support in the fonts themselves and not (merely) the absence of an appropriate LaTeX support package.