Wednesday, September 8, 2010

OOoLaTeX: Getting fonts to work

I've previously written about my enthusiasm for OOoLaTeX, a plugin that lets you typeset LaTeX equations in OpenOffice. I love it because the equations look beautiful, and I can cut paste from my LaTeX manuscripts (and wikipedia sources for lectures).

Recently, my office computer which runs Linux went through an upgrade, and you guessed it right, among the many things that broke was OOoLaTeX.

Getting and installing the plugin was a breeze, as I outlined in my previous post. However, it could not print AMS characters like \mathbf{v} or \boldsymbol{\tau} as it used to (and was supposed to).

But what I had forgotten in the time since I last installed it was how to get the right fonts. My older notes (contained in the previous blog) were not very helpful. Since one of the underlying motivations for this blog goes along the lines of Linus Torvalds' quote "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it" I thought I'd make more careful notes this time.

1. Download Bakoma fonts from CTAN. They are available as a set of files here, and save them.
2. I saved mine in a newly created directory ~/.fonts/bakoma
3. Since some of the characters are off in the original font set, replace them with the corrected ones found here in a tar-zipped file.
4. Untar, unzip and paste these files in ~/.fonts/bakoma, replacing some of the faulty older ones.
5. Type "fc-cache /panfs/panasas1/users/sshanbhag/.fonts/bakoma" in the terminal

And you should be good to go.

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