Workaround: FONT PROBLEM Mathematica 4.0 and SuSe Linux 7.3
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg38773] Workaround: FONT PROBLEM Mathematica 4.0 and SuSe Linux 7.3
- From: scherm.n at gmx.de (Norbert)
- Date: Fri, 10 Jan 2003 04:33:35 -0500 (EST)
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
Hello, thanks to Paul, Marko, Gerald, Matthias and Hendrik for their support. Menwhile I have a satisfactory workaround for my problem: In the following, step 1 & 2 remove the error messages while step 3 "solves" the problem. STEP 1) (not really necessary) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ In (sdb.suse.de/en/sdb/html/swiegra_kaestchenfonts.html) I found a hint so that I can guess now what happened. The Fontserver was considerably redesigned from SuSe Linux 6.x to version 7.3. It now provides a huge fontlist with more than 8000 entries! (Instead of less than 2000 in the older versions) This is the reason why the "Specific.tr" file has to be changed like proposed in http://support.wolfram.com/mathematica/systems/unix/interface/fonterrors.html. The suggested modification of the file "Specific.tr" prevents the error message "The Mathematica fonts are not properly installed in your system. Without these fonts, typeset mathematical expressions, cannot be displayed properly" during the startup of the Front End. However, after this modification the characters in the front end still remain invisible :-( . STEP 2) (not really necessary) ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The fontserver of the SuSe 7.3 Version provides a list with feature ISO10646-1 character encodings -- that is new. Mathematica, complains about missing an approriate encoding file by giving the error Message "The front end could not locate a Character Encoding file for the requested encoding (ISO10646-1)" The mess(age) results from a missing file "ISO10646-1.m" in the folder "/usr/local/mathematica/SystemFiles/CharacterEncodings/" You can create a link from any existing appropriate(?) file in this folder to get rid of the error message (see http://forums.wolfram.com/mathgroup/archive/2001/Dec/msg00344.html). But this will, unfortunately, not make the characters visible in the front end ... :-( STEP 3) ~~~~~~~ What finally helped me was the following: In the front end menu Edit -> Preferences -> Formatting Options -> Font Options -> Character Encoding I changed "Automatic" into "ISOLatin1" and the characters ... appeared :-) Now I have the characters more or less visible. I fear that the Encoding scheme I selected is not the best for all front end outputs so that some things are hard to read (uff). But ... I am able to work again ... Greetings, yours Norbert Scherm