Particle physicists have to overcome many obstacles in their efforts to understand the fundamental nature of matter and its interactions. The accelerators and detectors used in high-energy physics push modern technology to the limit, and massive computer power is needed to analyse the results of the experments. But sometimes particle physicists must overcome smaller problems - like how do you quickly place a line over a letter or character in a Word document to represent an anti-particle? This problem has now been solved by a team of physicists at the University of Mississippi-Oxford in the US.
In a paper entitled “A Microsoft Word Font for Anti-Matter”, Don Summers and colleagues explain how they have developed a font that allows users “to directly add overlined English and the most used overlined Greek characters to Microsoft Word documents on Apple Macintosh computers.” To make anti-matter a user simply types shift 5: for instance, shift 5 followed by B will produce an anti-B meson, while shift 5 followed by option shift z will produce an anti-Lambda particle. The font, called LinguistA, is available in 12 and 24 point type. Now all that is needed is something to make overlining easy on the Web.
