I was asking about missing or incorrect symbols yesterday. I found a solution.
In Lyx on Ubuntu 8.04, I noticed that SOME mathematical characters do not show properly on the screen. (Many symbols are fine.) For example, "\cdot" shows as "x" where it should have the centered dot and "\succ" just shows ERT "succ", where it should have a curved greater-than sign. I saw one other person post about this problem in this list, so I'm recording the answer for posterity. So far, in Ubuntu, I've found 2 solutions. Following advice on http://wiki.lyx.org/FAQ/Qt, I get the idea that a truetype font will fix this. One approach is to install the font package "http://movementarian.org/latex-xft-fonts-0.1.tar.gz"; under ~/.fonts and run "fc-cache -fv". That works. The math symbols in lyx all seem to display correctly. I've confirmed that the above workaround also works if one uses the supposedly better BaKoMa fonts, but I don't see much difference myself. These are the magic fonts that are installed by either package: cmmi10.ttf eufm10.ttf msam10.ttf cmsy10.ttf cmex10.ttf cmr10.ttf msbm10.ttf wasy10.ttf The one that fixes "\cdot" and "\succ" is cmsy10.ttf. I wondered why more Ubuntu users aren't befuddled by this. After some googling, I learned that "cmsy10.ttf" is available as an optional Ubuntu package "latex-xft-fonts". So I suppose that many Ubuntu users have that installed automatically so they never fight the mystery of missing screen fonts. I'll suggest to Ubuntu's lyx packager that latex-xft-fonts should be a required package. I try to tell myself I'm a better person for having spent an afternoon wading through this, but it is difficult to do it with a straight face. -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 University of Kansas
