Unicode's greek lambda

[Colin Adams]

I thought it was worth asking David Carlisle about this. Here is his reply:

Colin> I thought I would draw this complaint to your attention, since I think
> you are probably responsible for getting many of these symbols into
> Unicode in the first place.

David>I had no part in not lam(b)da:-) that's been there since the beginning
for greek text not for mathematics. Unicode know that their spelling is
eccentric (and even have a comment to that effect somewhere as I recall)
but the overriding rule is they never change the mames once assigned.


> Another problem is font support.. none of the fonts on my
> system (and I have quite a lot) have these codepoints defined.

David> That seems surprising. Some of the more exotic math characters added at
Unicode 3.2,4,5 are only just now getting into fonts (such as STIX and
Cambria math) but (almost) any truetype or type1 font built in the last
10 years or so should have the basic latin-greek-cyrillic font set, at
least.

David>Whether or not the editor that you are using knows about anything other
than ascii and can actually use the font is another matter of course.


2008/11/20 Arnar Birgisson <arnarbi at gmail.com>:
> On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 12:23, Duncan Coutts
> <duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 09:50 +0000, Jan Jakubuv wrote:
>>> Some others are (I have no idea why they are referenced as "lamda"
>>> instead of "lambda"):
>>
>> Yeah, that's why I missed them. I was searching for what I thought was
>> the correct spelling.
>
> Same here. Another problem is font support.. none of the fonts on my
> system (and I have quite a lot) have these codepoints defined. One
> would have to open them in a font editor and copy the greek lambda.
>
> cheers,
> Arnar
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