Bold lowercase Greek letters in maths

Questions & Help
1

I’m fairly new to Logseq, and started taking notes with some formulas dealing with matrices and vectors. I try to follow the textbook convention that vectors get lowercase bold letters, like this: $\bold{a}$. But $\bold{\alpha}$, or any other lowercase Greek letter, renders the letter in italics… like a scalar!
I’ve seen LaTeX solutions online that involve importing packages, which doesn’t seem an option with Logseq/KaTeX at the moment.
I guess more than a few Logseq-ers have encountered this problem before. Does anyone have suggestions or workarounds? :slight_smile:

1 Like
2

Welcome. Try these:

  • $\boldsymbol\alpha$
  • $\bm\alpha$
  • $\pmb\alpha$
  • $\textbf{α}$
2 Likes
3

Thanks! Do all those work for you? $\textbf{α}$ did the trick for me.

The behaviour with combining characters is inconsistent, though. For instance, if I want to put a hat on the letter, $\hat{\textbf{α}}$ and $\hat{\textbf{η}}$ work, but $\hat{\textbf{β}}$ and $\hat{\textbf{θ}}$ don’t work.

4

Their appearance varies like this:
image

  • Katex (the enabling software) complains with message “No character metrics”.
  • Seems that hat through \textbf is available for vowels only.
  • Here is how it looks with \boldsymbol, \bm and \pmb:
    image