[R-sig-Debian] degree symbol using X11 on Xubuntu 10.04

[Michael Rutter]

On 10/15/2010 03:27 AM, Christian Kamenik wrote:
> Michael,
>
> Many thanks for your quick reply. Unfortunately, removing
> ttf-symbol-replacement did not solve the problem. With demo(plotmath) I
> get an Upsilon1 instead of a ° for expression(32 *degree).
>
> Christian
>

Here is what I did to find the offending package:

I used a program called font-manager to see what file was causing the 
problem.  This is for the gnome desktop, but it should work in Xbuntu. 
There may be an equivalent program for Xbuntu and Kbuntu, but I am not sure.

If you are using maverick (10.10)

 > sudo apt-get install font-manager

For other versions (tested it on lucid)

Go here and get the appropriate deb file for your computer:

http://code.google.com/p/font-manager/downloads/list

 > sudo dpkg -i font-manager_0.5.6-1_i386.deb

Then run font-manager:

 > font-manager

A window will pop up and after a second or two, start to scan for fonts. 
  When finished, in the "Font" window, scroll down to "Symbol", just 
below "Standard Symbols".

If the window in the center says "The quick brown fox..." in 
latin/normal letters, then you should be OK.  If you can read the window 
and plotmath still is not working, I don't know what the problem is.

If the window in the center says "The quick brown fox..." in greek 
letters, then something is wrong. Click the button with a pointing 
finger just above the text box, "View font metadata".  Copy the file 
name and paste it into the "Search the contents of packages" at 
http://packages.ubuntu.com/.  Find the name of the package and remove it 
from your system.

I had to do this twice, meaning I removed a package, still saw greek 
letters, but had a different file name in the meta data window.  Make 
sure you reload "font-manager" with the button in the lower right-hand 
corner.  I think this is the problem, as multiple packages have supplied 
the encoding's for the symbol font.

I know this sounds counter-intuitive, as you would hope to be seeing 
greek letters for the symbol font, but I can now get plotmath to work 
correctly on all three of my machines following this procedure.  Not 
sure what other applications this will effect, but keep track of what 
you remove.  It might be the second one that is causing the problem and 
you can reinstall the first.

Hope this helps,
Michael

-- 
Dr. Michael A. Rutter
School of Science
Penn State Erie, The Behrend College
Station Road
Erie, PA 16563
http://math.bd.psu.edu/faculty/rutter