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Missing characters in MathFlow

Applicability

The information on this page applies to:

MathFlow 2.x

MathFlow SDK 2.x

Issue

You've inserted a special character into your equation, but MathFlow renders the character as an empty box or a red question mark.

Solution

There could be a couple of reasons causing MathFlow to be unable to render the character properly. Most likely no font installed on your system includes the character, but if you do have a font on your system with the character, you may have to follow certain steps to ensure that MathFlow recognizes the font.

Checking that the Font is Installed

If you have MathType 7 installed and active with a valid license key, you can look for font support for a particular character using the following steps:

  1. Open the MathType 7 Editor.

  2. Go to the Edit menu and choose "Insert Symbol".

  3. In the "View by" drop-down menu, select "Description".

  4. Click on the "New Search" button and enter the Unicode code point for the character (for instance, "007E" for tilde character ~). Press OK.

  5. Uncheck the "Show One of Each" box. If you click on one of the characters displayed, the font for the character will show in the lower left hand corner.

mathtypes_insert_symbol_dialog.png

If the character does not turn up in MathType 7 Insert Symbol dialog, you will need to find and install a font with the character. We recommend a large font such as Code2000. You can look up the Unicode point on the web to get suggestions for a font that does include the character.

Ensuring MathFlow Uses the Correct Font

In some rare cases, even if your system has the correct font installed, MathFlow will not find the font with the character in question. It could be MathFlow does not recognize the font encoding. If this is a font and character that you use often, you may wish to extend MathFlow font knowledge. Instructions for extending MathFlow font knowledge is included in the MathFlow documentation. Alternatively, MathFlow supports the fontfamily attribute, which you can use to explicitly set the font to use for the character.

We hope this has been helpful. If you continue to have problems with missing characters, please let us know. We'd love to hear from you if you have questions about this or if you have additional techniques that work.