LaTeX: Default font(s) for greek letters?

Question

I'm a programmer but new to (La)TeX. As far as I can tell, neither the Computer Modern nor Latin Modern fonts have glyphs for the full greek alphabet.

I installed (OS X) a Latin Modern font that came with TeX Live (lmroman10-regular.otf). As you can see in the attached image, the lowercase greek letters (and nabla) are displayed (TextEdit) using some default font.

Also shown in the image is LaTeXiT displaying pretty lowercase greek letters that seem to be Latin-Modern-Italic-ish.

So what font(s) are used by LaTeX for greek (and math symbols)? Where would I find them in the TeX fonts directory?

Image:

You might be able to figure out the font name by looking at font variations under special characters in the edit menu of any application. Many fonts have a full greek alphabet. — drawnonward
How did you reach the conclusion that Computer Modern doesn't provide the full Greek alphabet ? — High Performance Mark
I heard something like that math mode uses computer modern fonts. And it seems logical to me. Why to typeset greek alphabet via commands in special environment when glyphs are in basic font? My teacher said changing fonts in LaTeX is highway to hell because you never know where is some part used. — Crowley

Marco Marco · Accepted Answer · 2010-06-06T08:31:05

My TeX distro came with the following Computer Modern font collections (Adobe Type 1): cm, cm-extra, cm-lgc, cm-super, and cmcyr.

I was only able to install (Windows 7) and inspect (charmap) the files in the first two collections. I didn't find the greek lowercase alphabet anywhere, although it's probably there somewhere.

After some Googling, I found cm-unicode which is exactly what I needed.

LaTeX: Default font(s) for greek letters?

1 Answers