Re: Which fonts do I need to make Linux Stop Chirping?
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg37012] Re: [mg36993] Which fonts do I need to make Linux Stop Chirping?
- From: "P.J. Hinton" <paulh at wolfram.com>
- Date: Sun, 6 Oct 2002 05:33:02 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: "Wolfram Research, Inc."
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
On Fri, 4 Oct 2002, Steven wrote: > I came across this, and thought I would share. This may be OBE if the font > selection is better in 4.2. I'll that installed by this time tomorrow...I > hope. > > http://cgm.cs.mcgill.ca/~luc/math.html > > I started reading through this list, and had visions of recursively > downloading the entire internet looking for the font's I really need. > Anybody know what fonts I should have installed on my SuSE box to satisfy > Mathematica's default expectations? The contents of the page at this URL are interesting, but probably not relevant for your purposes. The only fonts which are absolutely needed by the front end are the fonts that supply the special glyphs for mathematical notation, grouping characters, Greek letters, etc. These fonts were developed by Wolfram Research and are installed as part of the Mathematica installation. There are two generations of these fonts. The first generation was introduced in Mathematica 3.0 in the fall of 1996 and were used through the release of Mathematica 4.1. There were five families known as Math1 - Math5. Each familiy had four variants: a proportionaly-spaced medium face, a monospaced medium, a proportional bold, and a monospaced bold. The second generation is used by Mathematica 4.2. There are seven families named Mathematica1 - Mathematica7. Aside from the math fonts, the front end should be able to function properly provided that you have a font that supports the encoding for your chosen locale. The style sheets bundled with the front end use only Times, Helvetica, and Courier. Should these fonts not be available on your system, the front end has some substitution rules. For example, the Windows front end knows to use the fonts Times New Roman, Arial, and Courier New. The X Window System ships with bitmap versions of Times, Helvetica, and Courier as well as an outline of Courier. If one of these fonts must be drawn at a size for which there are no bitmaps, outline fonts provided with Mathematica are used. Helvetica is aliased to Swiss721, and Times is aliased to Utopia through a fonts.alias file in the Mathematica fonts directory. Under MacOS and Windows, you should be albe to use whatever fonts are available on your system. Under X, things are a little more complicated. The front end can display whatever fonts are made available to your X server, but it can generate PostScript only for those fonts where an Adobe Font Metric (AFM) file is available. If you wish to display or print the PostScript, you must also make the Type 1 font file available to the rendering device. Note also that the X front end has an adjustable setting for the amount of memory to reserve for storing font data. If your system has a large number of fonts, you may need to increase this setting per this FAQ page: http://support.wolfram.com/mathematica/systems/linux/interface/fonterrors.html -- P.J. Hinton User Interface Programmer paulh at wolfram.com Wolfram Research, Inc. Disclaimer: Opinions expressed herein are those of the author alone.