How do you print lambda, nu, and delta in a text editor such as emacs or joe?

λ ν δ Λ Ν Δ
In gedit, I can use the character map to paste them in. I suppose you may escape the octal codes? If I find myself needing lots of this sort of thing for printed documents I end up using LaTeX. <curiosity aroused> Why, what are you trying to do with them?

I need the Lambda nu and delta for my chemistry homework.

and how would I go about using a charecter map in Xfce4 ?

As mentioned above, you are better off with LaTeX if you want to use lots of special symbols.

LaTeX commands:

\alpha
\Alpha
\beta
\Beta

...

Pretty easy. There are nice LaTeX suits for emacs and vim--don't know about the others.

For your chemistry homework ...
In FC3 there is a character map tool in main menue > accessories - follow your nose. Select the "greek" language and copy the characters over. You can cut and paste from your wordro. OR you can download the standard symbols font from microsoft?

However, if you plan to continue in sciences, take some advice from an old hand... learn to use latex. No kidding no itshay. It is actually designed to handle scientific documents - you can even print full chemical formulae properly formatted as well as mathematical relations. FC3 comes with latex and pdflatex. Good tutorials are available from http://www.ctan.org (I think).

I think Ill look up some latex tutorials and go with that.

Thanks for all the great advice

Try this one, it's the one I use...
http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/info...ish/lshort.pdf

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I need the Lambda nu and delta for my chemistry homework.

and how would I go about using a charecter map in Xfce4 ?
----------

Currently I have a character map called KCharSelect, and run
KDE or IceWM depending on what mood I'm in.... but I recall it's
very easy to add a menu option to xfce. Perhaps alongside your
preferred editor you could add an option with the command
"kcharselect", or whichever is on your system. Then you can load
that as well as your editor. Then it's available as a cut-&-paste
tool.


Paul