# Georgian capital letter “Ⴒ” (“tar”) in pdfLaTeX

I am trying to use “Ⴒ” (Georgian capital "tar" {U+10b2}) and “ք” (Armenian "keh" {U+0584}) as special variable names in a document compiled with pdflatex on Overleaf. The document is 100% English. I chose those characters because they look like the superimposition of “P” + “L” → “Ⴒ”, and “p” + “f” → “ք”

I got the “ք” (Armenian) working with this [1].  Is there a similarly simple way to produce “Ⴒ” (Georgian)?

From what I've read [2, 3, 4], I think the problem is due to a lack of a native TeX font that supports Georgian. Those solutions appear to work for XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX, because they are able to use TTF fonts. I don't understand any of this well, so I may be mistaken. Adding \usepackage[georgian]{babel} caused undecipherable error messages.

This seems like a ridiculous amount of reading and digging to insert two standard unicode characters. Isn't there a simpler way?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
\usepackage[OT6,T1]{fontenc}

%--------------------------------------------------------------------
% Credit: 'egreg' https://tex.stackexchange.com/a/443141/103622
\newcommand{\armenian}{\fontencoding{OT6}\fontfamily{cmr}\selectfont}
\DeclareTextFontCommand{\textarmenian}{\armenian}
%--------------------------------------------------------------------

\newcommand{\keh}{\textarmenian{ք}}  ## WORKS

% \newcommand{\tar}{\▒▒▒{Ⴒ}}         ## DESIRED

\begin{document}

keh: \keh{} ... in equation:  $\keh{}^\keh{}$     %% WORKS

% Tar: \tar{} ... in equation:  $\tar{}^\tar{}$   %% DESIRED

\end{document}

• I don't believe you can use UNICODE with pdflatex. – Steven B. Segletes Sep 9 '19 at 17:36
• @StevenB.Segletes It works for Armenian (as shown). I've also tested Japanese and Russian with pdflatex. – Alex Quinn Sep 9 '19 at 17:54
• Yes, it works for the Armenian, but not by using UNICODE. Rather it works by allocating one of the 256 standard slots to the glyph, by way of the OT6 encoding. There may be something similar for the Georgian letter, but it will not involve UNICODE. UNICODE operates by using 2 bytes to encode glyphs, which is fundamentally a different process. – Steven B. Segletes Sep 9 '19 at 17:57
• The shape of the “uppercase” tar is quite variable; actually, the Georgian alphabet has no distinction of uppercase and lowercase; the common alphabet is mxedruli (only lowercase); for emphasis, Asomtavruli can be used. See en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgian_scripts – egreg Sep 9 '19 at 18:20
• @StevenB.Segletes I wouldn't quite say you can't use Unicode with pdfTeX. Though less convenient than XeTeX/LuaTeX, one can input UTF-8 with \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}, and obtain specific Unicode output by defining what TeX should do with that input. (See for example this answer or this one.) Also, nitpicking, but Unicode doesn't use 2 bytes to encode glyphs; Unicode only assigns codepoints in range 0–10FFFF to (roughly) abstract characters (encoded as 1–4 bytes with UTF-8) and glyphs are left to fonts. – ShreevatsaR Sep 9 '19 at 19:26

Would this alternative approach suffice?

\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
\begingroup\ooalign{P\cr L}\endgroup
\end{document}


• Always use \ooalign{...} inside a group. – egreg Sep 9 '19 at 18:23
• A somewhat decent result for the other combination can be produced with \ooalign{p\cr\kern-0.1pt\raisebox{-1.945pt}{f}}. – Oleg Lobachev Sep 9 '19 at 18:33
• @OlegLobachev Thank you. It wasn't exactly clear to me what the OP was seeking in terms of the lower-case alternative, but that is certainly one possibility. – Steven B. Segletes Sep 9 '19 at 18:44
• Wow, this is really nice! It works in the equation, too. Thanks! – Alex Quinn Sep 9 '19 at 18:48

For completeness, there is a Georgian font package for pdflatex, see https://www.ctan.org/pkg/mxedruli. The Tar character is part of the Xucuri set, which can be accessed with \usepackage{xucuri}. The input is a set of ascii-based character combinations, with Ⴒ made by .T. Note that the character looks a bit different, like the difference between a serif and a sans serif font (although I don't know anything about Georgian, so maybe the difference is caused by something else entirely).

MWE:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{xucuri}
\usepackage{amsmath}
\def\tar{\raisebox{-1pt}{\text{\begin{xucr}.T\end{xucr}}}}
\begin{document}
$x=\tar(1)$
\end{document}


Result:

• Thanks! This works, too. It is actually the most direct answer to this question. I looked for packages, but all I could find was babel, which wasn't working at all. – Alex Quinn Sep 10 '19 at 5:00

You would use the T8M/T8K encodings.

This requires the georgian CTAN package, which on TeX Live 2019 should be installed to texmf-local.

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T8M,T8K,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{amsmath}

\newcommand\mathTar{\mathord{\text{\usefont{T8M}{cmr}{m}{it}\symbol{"93}}}}

\begin{document}
$$\mathTar = P \cdot L$$
\end{document}


As you can see, the “Computer Modern Roman” Georgian font is really a closer match for DejaVu Serif. You might instead try the sans-serif cmgt font family, or something like this, which matches the “Dejavu Georgian” font family to DejaVu Serif:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage[T8M,T8K,T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage[scaled=0.95]{DejaVuSerif}
\usepackage[italic]{mathastext}
\usepackage{amsmath}

\newcommand\mathTar{\mathord{\text{\usefont{T8M}{djg}{m}{it}\symbol{"93}}}}

\begin{document}
$$\mathTar = P \cdot L$$
\end{document}


• This didn't work for me using pdfLaTeX on Overleaf. I get three errors: ➊ Encoding scheme T8M' unknown and ➋ Package fontenc Error: Encoding file t8menc.def' not found. and ➌ Package fontenc Error: Encoding file t8kenc.def' not found. – Alex Quinn Sep 10 '19 at 15:14
• @AlexQuinn Overleaf doesn’t have the georgian` package installed, then. You might be able, as an ugly hack, to download the files from CTAN and save them in your project folder. – Davislor Sep 10 '19 at 17:37