How to get a specific variant of the greek symbol tau?

Is there a way to get the following form of the tau symbol for matlab?

I want to use this on the axis of a plot and currently I am using the following code to do this

xlabel('{\tau}').

However, this gives the following symbol, without any hook on the bottom

.

[Sindar]

Matlab is kinda a pain when it comes to special characters. I can't figure it out, but someone else might be able to.

char(964) prints this symbol to the command line, but xlabel(char(964)) creates a different one.

The unicode character you want is U+1D70F (https://www.compart.com/en/unicode/U+1D70F) There should be a way to get this in Matlab (I would have thought '\x1D70F', but "Warning: The hex value specified is outside the range of the character set.")

[Guillaume]

Matlab is UTF16, so you need to convert that 32-bit unicode to UTF16

char([0xD835 0xDF0F])

Ironically, while matlab uses UTF16 internally, it doesn't officially support writing or reading UTF16. You get a warning if you try (yet it still appears to work).

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

The latex symbol for this is \uptau, unfortunately matlab latex parser doesn't support it.

As Sindar commented, you can try to get around by using a unicode character instead. Indeed U+1D70F would be the correct symbol and assuming your default font supports it, it would be the way to go. Matlab uses UTF16, U+1D70F is [0xD835 0xDF0F]in UTF16:

xlabel(char([0xD835 0xDF0F]));  %Requires R2019b or later. Earlier versions use: char([55349 57103])

Another option would be to find a font installed on your system that renders the normal tau, U+3C4, as you want. On my system, the Times font does the job:

xlabel(char(0x3C4), 'FontName', 'Times');

It's going to be trial and error for finding a suitable font. You can list the fonts available on your system with listfonts.

Note that the font does not affect latex of tex symbols.

[Salman Khan]

That worked. Thanks a lot.