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Mathematica notebooks don't print or PDF well under Linux

  • To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
  • Subject: [mg95875] Mathematica notebooks don't print or PDF well under Linux
  • From: j.f.b.payne at tesco.net
  • Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2009 05:52:41 -0500 (EST)

Hello,

This is a specifically Linux (or X-windows) related post.

If you stray from the standard fonts (Times, Helvetica, Courier)
you'll find that although non-standard fonts render properly in a
Mathematica notebook displayed on screen, they typically convert to
Courier when printed or PDF-ed.

Even with the default text cell font, use of certain characters
(opening single or double quotes, for example) generates a beep (error
message "Unable to find Font Times...") when printing or saving as
PDF.  The PDF produced has badly laid out text (two or three spaces
after the quotation marks).

There may be other related problems but I can't quickly reproduce
them.

Printing has always been a bit of an issue with Mathematica under
Linux from before version 5, I think, and the above mentioned problems
are present in version 7.

I've spoken to Wolfram tech. support about this and they've responded
"our developers are well aware of all the issues involved and this
will be fixed given time and resources".

If any of you Mathematica on Linux users out there care about the
printing problem, I ask you to e-mail Wolfram and tell them so.
Hopefully, that will increase the chance of time and resources being
spent on fixing the problems.

>From recent discussions on this newsgroup, it looks like Mathematica
on Linux users probably produce typeset output by using LaTeX.  I know
this is a nice solution, but one must learn many details if one wants
to produce a particular document format that isn't one of the supplied
ones, whereas I can already (more-or-less) do it in Mathematica.
However, if only very few Mathematica on Linux users want to use
Mathematica directly for typeset output, it is reasonable for Wolfram
not to give priority to fixing it.  The object of this post is to try
to get some data on how many Linux users do want to use Mathematica
directly for typeset output.

Thank you

John Payne


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