Mathematica 6 under wine - really strange font behavior

[noahsark1126]

There seems to be an issue with the display of certain fonts in Mathematica 6. The best examples are

1. The horizontal line to indicate a over b, which is printed as an absurdly thick black bar with the numerator and denominator way too far above and below it

2. The == sign, which is used often for equation solving and such. This doesn't even display a character, it's just a box.

See the screenshot for what I'm talking about. The result of the first integral is supposed to be x^3/3, and the cosine of that angle is 1/sqrt2. You can also see the missing == in the equation.

Can someone help? This isn't a big deal for small things like this...I can still figure out what it says. But for more complicated results, it becomes impossible to see what's going on.

I'm running Hardy beta with an ATI card and compiz. The reason I'm using wine is because the linux version of mathematica had even worse fonts than this - in fact, they weren't even visible, they were just little unreadable black dots. Perhaps this indicates a problem with my system overall?

[happyhamster]

- Try installing the windows truetype fonts:

sudo apt-get install msttcorefonts

- If that didn't help, take a look at:
http://support.wolfram.com/mathemati...testfonts.html

Good luck.

[jjk7288]

Why don't you just use the native Linux version? If you have a license already you should be able to just download the Linux copy of it.

[noahsark1126]

msttcorefonts is already installed...I also downloaded the latest fonts from wolfram, with no improvement.

Also, @ jjk, I have tried the Linux version as I said in the first post. Because of some problem with compiz or motif, the fonts were even less readable than under wine.

Any other ideas?

[noahsark1126]

More possibly useful info:

I have the exact same program installed on my actual Windows XP partition. It runs perfectly under native windows. So I tried to run that version under wine, instead of the version in ~/.wine/drive_c. The exact same thing happened. This seems to indicate that the problem is not a missing font, but rather a problem with the rendering of a font. I think...

[jjk7288]

msttcorefonts is already installed...I also downloaded the latest fonts from wolfram, with no improvement.

Also, @ jjk, I have tried the Linux version as I said in the first post. Because of some problem with compiz or motif, the fonts were even less readable than under wine.

Any other ideas?

And you think that by running Mathematica under Wine, this would somehow fix a problem with Compiz?

Both Wine and Compiz are beta (read: not bug free) and you shouldn't go around looking to fix Mathematica when the problem probably derives from the use of one of these programs (or possibly Motif, but I don't know much about that).

What's to keep you from disabling Compiz at least while using Mathematica? If that fixes the problem, then you know that it's Compiz (and that there's probably not much more you can do than submit a bug report)

[noahsark1126]

And you think that by running Mathematica under Wine, this would somehow fix a problem with Compiz?

Both Wine and Compiz are beta (read: not bug free) and you shouldn't go around looking to fix Mathematica when the problem probably derives from the use of one of these programs (or possibly Motif, but I don't know much about that).

What's to keep you from disabling Compiz at least while using Mathematica? If that fixes the problem, then you know that it's Compiz (and that there's probably not much more you can do than submit a bug report)

I am quite aware that Wine and Compiz are beta versions and by no means perfect. But this doesn't mean by any stretch that I am simply going to give up on an issue and say "oh well, it's not even version 1.0, it's bound to mess up sometimes." If I did, I would still be using Windows. So yes, I disagree - I think I absolutely should go around trying to fix Mathematica.

I decided to try Mathematica under Wine because the native motif version did not work in the slightest, and I have read that it works well with Wine. Indeed, it does come much closer to doing the job, so I figured I would stick with the Wine version and try to fix those issues.

I will certainly try running Mathematica with metacity as opposed to compiz, but it would also be much more ideal to not have to do that, since temporarily running metacity has the unfortunate side effect of placing every single window on workspace 1.

[noahsark1126]

Update: Definitely not a Compiz problem. Tried running with metacity and got the exact same effect.

[schtufbox]

Which fonts does it use anyway? could be one not included in the msttcorefonts package, like tahoma or something.

[noahsark1126]

Which fonts does it use anyway? could be one not included in the msttcorefonts package, like tahoma or something.

It uses Courier New, which is in msttcorefonts.