Re: Mathematica Fonts question
- To: mathgroup@smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg12182] Re: Mathematica Fonts question
- From: "P.J. Hinton" <paulh@wolfram.com>
- Date: Fri, 1 May 1998 03:08:34 -0400
- Organization: Wolfram Research, Inc.
- References: <6i0ria$8it@smc.vnet.net>
On 26 Apr 1998, karland arthur kilian wrote: > I have encountered a problem when trying to run Mathematica. I work on > a Pentium machine with Debian Linux. I can connect to another machine > that has Mathematica, but when I try to view it on my machine, I > receive an error message "The Mathematica fonts are not properly > installed in your system" > > Can anyone advise me as to which fonts I need to install and how I can > do this? Thanks. Mathematica 3.0 uses five families of special fonts to produce typeset mathematics. These fonts must be available to Mathematica in order for the front end to function properly. When you display the Mathematica X front end client on your local Linux machine, it is necessary for you to make sure that these fonts are available to that machine's X server. The script that starts the X front end on the remote machine cannot do this for you because the commands for doing this must be executed on your Linux machine. To make the fonts available to the local X server, you must add the directories with the Math fonts to your X server's font path. This must be done _before_ you launch the front end. This can be done by executing the following command on a shell running on your local Linux machine. xset fp+ <path to Mathematica outline fonts> xset fp+ <path to Mathematica bitmap fonts> These paths may vary on your system. If the Mathematica installation is visible via NFS on your Linux machine, you can determine the paths by starting up the Mathematica kernel from a shell and evaluating $TopDirectory. This will give you the path to the Mathematica installation. From there, the outline fonts are in SystemFiles/Fonts/Type1 and the bitmap fonts are in SystemFiles/Fonts/X. So, if $TopDirectory evaluates to "/usr/local/mathematica", the appropriate commands would be: xset fp+ /usr/local/mathematica/SystemFiles/Fonts/Type1 xset fp+ /usr/local/mathematica/SystemFiles/Fonts/X If you use outline fonts for Helvetica, and you are using XFree86 3.2 or later, then you will want to append ":unscaled" to the second command to suppress scaling of the lone Helvetica bitmap font file that comes with Mathematica. If you cannot access these directories thorough NFS, you can check with your system administrator to see if the Mathematica fonts are available from a Unix host running an X font server. Instructions for adding a font server to the font path are available in the book _X Window System User's Guide_ by V. Quercia and T. O'Reilly (O'Reilly & Assoc.), Chapter 6. See the section titled "Adding a Server to the Font Path". If a font server is not available, then you may need to install local copies of the Mathematica fonts. Check with your system administrator to see whether their Mathematica license permits this and to get details on how to install them on your local system. -- P.J. Hinton Mathematica Programming Group paulh@wolfram.com Wolfram Research, Inc. http://www.wolfram.com/~paulh/ Disclaimer: Opinions expressed herein are those of the author alone.