How to test if a font is unicode?

I write almost all of my papers in LaTEX, and use polutonikogreek (a part of the babel package) to typeset the Ancient Greek. The journal I’m interested in submitting a paper to requires that all Greek be typeset in a Unicode font. How do I test whether the font is Unicode? I tried reading the documentation for the package, and searching Google for the answer, but everything I found was either not relevant or too technical for me to understand. Am I missing something obvious?

Does the requirement apply to the input file or the output file? In other words, when you submit, does the Unicode requirement apply to the .tex file or the .pdf file?

I’m not an expert in these things by any means, but I think it will make a difference. If you don’t get good answers here, you might try popping over to tex.stackexchange.com and asking this same question there.

The requirements apply to the .pdf file. I don’t think they have any interest in ever seeing the .tex file.

XeTeX is an adaptation of TeX that supports unicode.

Unicode is constantly evolving and adding new languages. This page shows all the unicode fonts that include Greek characters. Don’t see plutonikogreek in there, but plenty of font families cover the entire Greek spectrum, including Arial and TNR.

Here is an article about how a typesetter resolved an issue he was having with plutonikogreek and LaTeX.

One more thing: I think the reason why the vendor requested unicode is because it used to be a fix to prevent PDFs from displaying different fonts. As long as you have “Embed All Fonts” checked in Acrobat (which is default), it shouldn’t be a problem anymore.

LaTeX does not use acrobat. But pdfLaTeX does embed all fonts and I don’t know what it even means to be using unicode. The fonts used are embedded in the pdf file, whatever form they’re in. I use LaTeX extensively and I neither know nor care how the fonts are represented internally and I cannot imagine why anyone would so long as it displays and prints correctly. I don’t write in Greek, but I use lots of Greek letters and mathematical symbols.

I just had an episode with a journal whose web site demanded all sorts of obscure requirements (Times New Roman fonts and they wanted a printed copy mailed to the them), except the editor didn’t care about any of that; all she wanted was a pdf file conforming to the margin requirements. So don’t trust everything someone puts on a web site, even their own requirements.

The encoding can do weird stuff if you want to copy+paste. When I was doing linguistics, the package I was using did not play nicely with copy+paste, for instance, IPA characters like ɸ would copy as “2”. So if you copied the plaintext, you’d get things like “The sound 2”, which you likely wouldn’t if the entire thing was in a uniform unicode font.

That sound, I don’t know if copy+pasting will tell you for certain what the character encoding is. I honestly don’t know if there’s a way to tell other than knowing that the font package you’re using is unicode.

He means the difference from fonts like, say, the Symbol font which maps the Greek letters to the usual roman alphabet, and the ones that follow Unicode and map the Greek letters to where Unicode says they should be mapped.

He wants to know how to test if the font he is currently using follows the Unicode rules.

As far as I know, the babel package uses Unicode. And you should be able to copy and paste from the PDF to test this.

Unfortunately, this PDF file suggests otherwise: http://solar.physics.montana.edu/kankel/ph567/resources/LaTeX/add-ons/GreekLanguage/Keyboard%20Polutonikogreek.pdf

I actually opened it with Inkscape, which will not process the embedded fonts. And the code points are all wrong. I get ●❉❊❩❍❏■❑▲▼◆❳❖P❘❙❚❯❋◗❨ for the capital Greek letters.

The latest versions of TeX will handle Greek Text natively, so maybe you can just use search and replace. Or maybe this will help: http://vikhyat.net/projects/latex_to_unicode/

I see. When I cut and paste from a pdf file, mathematical formulas are generally rendered as garbage. But then so are digraphs (fl and fi). My work uses a lot of diagrams and they are produced as strings of dots with arrowheads taken from a special font of arrowheads at 256 different directions. I am not sure any of this makes sense in unicode. I assume that unicode does not include arrowheads in 256 directions.