Re: Font problems w SuSE 7.3 / Partial Solution
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg32085] Re: Font problems w SuSE 7.3 / Partial Solution
- From: "Hans E. Plesser" <hans.plesser at itf.nlh.no>
- Date: Sat, 22 Dec 2001 04:23:04 -0500 (EST)
- References: <9vpnt4$cb0$1@smc.vnet.net>
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
<posted & mailed> Hi! I have now found a more or less working solution to the font problems arising when using Mathematica under SuSE 7.3. The main issue is that X is installed in such a way that all possible font encodings are activated for all fonts, e.g. Chinese big5 encoding or Russian koi8-r encoding for "normal" western fonts such as Utopia or Helvetica (take a look at the fonts.scale files in subdirectories of /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/). This massively confuses Mathematica, which does not have character encoding files for all these encodings (see mathematica/SystemFiles/CharacterEncodings). The KDE Font Installer (Settings / X) allows one to configure the X-fonts such that only a single encoding is used, but this does not help, since Mathematica doesn't start any longer if only 8859-1 encoding is available. It might also impair international web-browsing on exotic sites. The one "solution" I have found was to remove from /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/encodings and its subdirs all *.enc(.gz) files that did not have counterparts in the Mathematica CharacterEncoding directory. I then started the KDE Font Installer, chose advanced mode, touched all font directories (right click) and "Applied". In addition, I created a symbolic link ISO10646-1.m -> Unicode.m in mathematica/SystemFiles/CharacterEncodings, since 10646-1 is Unicode. Things seem to work now: I still get error messages about koi8-r encoding missing in Mathematica, but that does not seem to affect the display of notebooks (koi9-r encoding is hardwired in X, so it cannot be deactivated by deleting an encoding file. But this is a temporary solution at best. Since providing a large set of character encodings with a Linux systems seems smart (so people can surf anywhere in the world and write texts in whatever language they like), in my opinion Mathematica should become better at handling font encodings it does not know about; or to check with the X server whether it has any given font available in an encoding Mathematica knows. Hans --------------------------------------------------------------------- Dr. Hans Ekkehard Plesser Tel. : +47 6494 8832 Physics Section / ITF Fax : +47 6494 8810 Agricultural University of Norway e-mail: hans.plesser at itf.nlh.no N-1432 Ås, Norway WWW : arken.nlh.no/~itfhep ---------------------------------------------------------------------