The *easiest* solution is to just say \alpha and \beta in the org file
instead of α and β. But biting the bullet and adopting XeTeX or LuaTeX is
probably the *best* way to go (he says without ever having used either...)
For those who stick with pdflatex, you can also use "α" directly in the
org document, and define
#+latex_header: \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
#+latex_header: \declareunicodecharacter{03b1}{α}
Provided your file is indeed encoded in utf-8 (but why would you use any
other encoding?)
This simply tells the compiler to bind "α" to the unicode character
"greek small letter alpha" (U+03B1). If there is a lot of unicode in the
document, XeTeX/LuaTeX are definitely better choices.
Clément
