Comment 0 for bug 654484

Rendered in 21pt Italic

Sample Glyphs:

ν=v x=χ

Description:

Some lowercase Greek and Latin characters use the same glyph in italic style.
This is quite unfortunate for formula typesetting. Especially in physics.
Many sans-serif fonts have this problem. It is the reason most people use serif fonts for formula typesetting, including myself. Since in almost every font, many of the Greek uppercase letters share glyphs with Latin uppercase letters, these Greek uppercase letters are not distinguished from the equivalent Latin uppercase letters in formula typesetting: ABEHKMNOTXZ ...
Thus the ambiguity is usually given by using lowercase Greek and Latin letters. As far as I know, in formula typesetting the lowercase letters are usually used in italic style. So it would be great if at least the italic versions are distinguishable. The only exception I know about, is the Greek υ (U+03C5) which is often hard to distinguish from Latin u (U+0075), so in formula typesetting usually only the latter is used.

In the current ubuntu-font the following characters share the same glyph:
 • the Greek ν (nu) and Latin v, which is awful for semi classical calculations for example
 • the Greek χ (chi) and Latin x, which is a problem if an indicator function is named χ and the variable is x

In most sans-serif fonts these two cases are unambiguous in italic style. So these occur more often than one would think.

UA String:

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux x86_64; de; rv:1.9.2.10) Gecko/20100915 Ubuntu/10.04 (lucid) Firefox/3.6.10