https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=101009
Bug ID: 101009
Summary: Greek symbols should default to italics
Product: LibreOffice
Version: 5.1.4.2 release
Hardware: All
OS: All
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Severity: normal
Priority: medium
Component: Formula Editor
Assignee: [email protected]
Reporter: [email protected]
Greek symbols in LibreOffice formula editor are entered using codes like %rho
and %DELTA. Currently (since ~2012), Greek symbols have defaulted to non-italic
text even though earlier versions (~2011) gave italics by default.
This change puts LibreOffice at odds with regular formula editors in Microsoft
Office, with standard Latex math, and with Wikipedia. Any standard mathematics
textbook or chemistry, engineering or physics textbook will use Greek italics
as the almost universal convention. All the academic journals I know use Greek
italics as their preferred formatting. Only authors who have little or no
experience of accepted publishing conventions will choose to use non-italic
greek letter as their default.
Nevertheless, in 2010, the OpenOffice developer Thomas Lange made a change
which resulted in nonitalic Greek letters being the default, and no we must use
%irho, %itheta etc in order to get 'normal' behaviour. This was done on the
basis of a supposed user survey, but as noted above, I am quite sure that the
decision was made completely at odds with accepting high-quality publishing
conventions. This change makes old documents behave strangely, since editing an
equation with %rho etc will cause italic greek letters to change spontaneously
to non-italic. It is also annoying, since there are more keystrokes required to
render an equation, and equations become less readable.
I note also that, at least for a while, there was a registry setting in
LibreOffice that could be used to restore the standard Greek character
formatting (see
https://ask.libreoffice.org/en/question/3966/greek-letters-in-math-formula-have-reverted-to-non-italic/?answer=20212#post-id-20212).
But when I test this in LO 5.1.4.2, this feature also seems to have
disappeared.
Could we please restore the sane pre-2011 behaviour in LO and/or allow users a
way to set their preferred rendering of Greek characters %rho %DELTA etc to
*italic* instead of *non-italic*?
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