Print Latex/Greek-Chars to Commandline

Is it possible to fprintf a string to commandline which includes latex characters (I know its possible on figures etc).

The below snippet doesn't work but maybe there's a clever workaround?

a = 45; fprintf(['\lambda=',num2str(a)])

Daniel below mentions a possible HTML to LaTeX workaround - does anyone have a solution in this vain?

[Pietro]

Hi, sorry i'm a kinda late :). However i was looking for an answer to the same question and (since Matlab supports HTML code) i tried typing the following lines:

charlambda=char(955); %HTML numeric entity for lambda
a=45;
lambda_string=[num2str(charlambda),' = ', num2str(a),'\n'];sprintf(lambda_string)

Answer 1

[Mark Whirdy]

Mathworks support:

Thank you for contacting Mathworks.

The feature of typing Greek letter from MATLAB command line is not available in the current releases of MATLAB, this is because that MATLAB is using windows-1252 as its Default Character Set, and from the link below you will see the Greek letters are not included in this Character Set.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252>

For more reading about this topic, you can refer to the link below:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12338141/using-greek-alphabet-in-matlab

Answer 2

[Daniel Shub]

Yes and no. The commandline does not have a LaTeX interpreter so so you cannot pass it LaTeX code. The commandline does handle HTML so if you can go from LaTeX to HTML you can get there. For your case the workaround is simplier:

a = 45; fprintf(['λ=',num2str(a), '\n'])

[Mark Whirdy]

Thanks Daniel,

It seems that commandline doesn't recognise the greek symbol in your example. I guess because its not an ANSI char set?

>> fprintf(['λ=',num2str(a), '\n'])
=45

>> char(1:200)
ans =
  

 !"#$%&'()*+,-./0123456789:;<=>?@ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~ ¡¢£¤¥¦§¨&copy;ª«¬­&reg;¯°±²³´µ¶·¸¹º»¼½¾¿ÀÁÂÃÄÅÆÇÈ

[Daniel Shub]

200 isn't far enough. What does char(955) give you? My MATLAB can display λ just fine.

[Mark Whirdy]

Thats strange.

>> char(955) is a square character . Same for my colleague.

char(955:2000) are all square characters

[Jan]

I get different results with Matlab 6.5, 2009a and 2011b under different operating systems.

[Mark Whirdy]

I'm on 2012b Windows XP Version 5.1 (Build 2600: Service Pack 3). I guess I'll ask mathworks support.

[Daniel Shub]

@Jan what do you get with 6.5? What about with 2009a? 2011b? What OS are these versions running on?

On my Linux system with 2013a char(955) gives me λ.

[Jan]

@Daniel: 2009a/Win7/64: char(955) draws the rectangular shape for an undefined character. This happens for different fonts also. The same happens for 2011b. For 6.5/XP/32 I get a kind of two closing parenthesis. For characters higher than 255, only the lower byte is considered.

[Mehmet Mahmudoglu]

This code only works for command line but not from m file if you use it in m file you have to use

a = 45; fprintf([num2str(char(955)),' = ',num2str(a), '\n'])

[Anurag Gupta]

why not from .m file?