How to type Capital Pi
To type Capital Pi (Π), press Alt + 8719 on Windows, holding Alt while typing the digits on the numeric keypad, or press Option + Shift + P on Mac, or write Π in HTML. On any system you can copy it from this page, or enter its codepoint U+03A0 directly: Ctrl+Shift+U then 03a0 on Linux, or 03a0 then Alt+X in Microsoft Word.
Greek Capital Letter Pi
- Copy it
- Unicode
- U+03A0
- Windows
- Alt + 8719 needs regedit
| Where | Shortcut | How |
|---|---|---|
| Windows | Alt + 8719 | Above 255, so Windows will not accept it as typed. Copy the character instead. |
| Mac | Option + Shift + P | Press the keys together. |
| HTML | Π | Paste this into HTML source. |
| Unicode | U+03A0 | GREEK CAPITAL LETTER PI |
Other greek symbols
Π lives in the Greek and Coptic block (U+0370-U+03FF), the Greek alphabet, used throughout mathematics and the sciences. Within Unicode it is classified as Lu, an uppercase letter. It has a lowercase counterpart and changes under case conversion. Its bidirectional class makes it left-to-right.
Its lowercase counterpart is π (U+03C0). They are separate codepoints, so a byte comparison treats them as different characters even though a case-insensitive search does not.
What Capital Pi is used for
In mathematical notation Π is a variable: it stands for a quantity rather than acting on one, so an equation treats it the way it treats x, and the spacing around it is the spacing around a letter. That is the classification unicode-math gives it, and it is what decides how the symbol is set: $\mupPi$ in LaTeX, in maths mode rather than in a sentence.
The command is \mupPi rather than the \Pi most people reach for, and the difference is not cosmetic: mup is unicode-math for maths, upright, and this codepoint is the upright letter. Plain LaTeX's short command gives the sloped math-italic letter, which is a different character with a different codepoint. Copying Π into an equation gets you the upright one.
Π is a letter before it is a symbol, and on the Greek keyboard layout it is simply Shift and P: the key your keycap already calls P. That is the route when you are typing Greek rather than reaching for one character. How to type Greek on a keyboard has the whole map.
What Π gets confused with
Π has lookalikes that are a different character underneath. Search, sorting and anything that compares strings can tell them apart even where a reader cannot.
∏ (U+220F) is the n-ary product operator, the mathematical sign for the same reason the summation sign is.
π (U+03C0) is small pi, the circle constant, which is a different letter altogether.
What Unicode says about Capital Pi
The code chart points from Π to Product and double-struck capital pi (U+213F). These are the characters the standard thinks you might have meant instead, which makes them the ones worth checking when Capital Pi looks nearly right but not quite.
How Capital Pi behaves in software
Π is East Asian Ambiguous: one column in a Western locale and two in a CJK one. That is why a table that lines up on your machine can break on somebody else's, with no change to the text at all. It is a left-to-right character, so it holds that direction even inside a right-to-left paragraph.
Every way to write Capital Pi
| Form | Value |
|---|---|
| Codepoint | U+03A0 |
| Decimal | 928 |
| UTF-8 bytes | CE A0 |
| UTF-16 bytes | 03 A0 |
| HTML entity | Π |
| HTML numeric | Π or Π |
| CSS | \03A0 |
| JavaScript | \u03A0 |
| Python | \u03A0 |
| URL-encoded | %CE%A0 |
| LaTeX, in maths mode | $\mupPi$ |
| SVG | 03A0.svg · (SIL Open Font License) |
If Π arrives as Î
That is this exact character, undamaged: its two UTF-8 bytes CE A0 are being read one at a time as Windows-1252. The Latin-1 range is where this happens most, because it is the range every legacy system thought it already handled. Nothing is lost, and retyping will not help: the fix is at the reading end, which has to be told the text is UTF-8. An empty rectangle is the opposite complaint, and means the encoding is right and the font has no glyph for U+03A0.