{"id":1492,"date":"2015-03-02T18:46:31","date_gmt":"2015-03-02T17:46:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/?p=1492"},"modified":"2025-06-16T18:38:07","modified_gmt":"2025-06-16T16:38:07","slug":"xetex-and-your-math-is-bitmapped","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/?p=1492","title":{"rendered":"XeTeX and your math is bitmapped?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I have now been using XeLaTex exclusively for quite a while for all my LaTeX work, which essentially means for everything: lecture notes, lecture slides, lab instructions, letters, reports,&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>For some shorter time the symbols in my equations would show up ok on screen but a bit blurry on printouts. I was looking for the culprit in all different directions: settings in my PDF readers, font download to the printer, the printer itself,&#8230;<\/p>\n<p>Today I finally decided thtat it was enough and that I finally should find the source of the problem. And see there: XeLaTeX incorporated bitmapped symbols into my PDFs:<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1493\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1493\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/20150302_xelatex_bitmapped.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/20150302_xelatex_bitmapped-300x154.png\" alt=\"Bitmapped math in XeLaTeX output.\" width=\"300\" height=\"154\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1493\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/20150302_xelatex_bitmapped-300x154.png 300w, https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/20150302_xelatex_bitmapped-150x77.png 150w, https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/20150302_xelatex_bitmapped-400x205.png 400w, https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/20150302_xelatex_bitmapped.png 862w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1493\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Bitmapped math in XeLaTeX output.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>A quick search on Google showed that Was not alone with this observation, but the different solutions did not really work out for me, e.g. the usage of <em>mathspec<\/em>. But then I found this one on StackExchange: <a href=\"http:\/\/tex.stackexchange.com\/questions\/204688\/math-symbols-coming-out-blurry-bitmapped\" title=\"math-symbols-coming-out-blurry-bitmapped\" target=\"_blank\">http:\/\/tex.stackexchange.com\/questions\/204688\/math-symbols-coming-out-blurry-bitmapped<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Indeed &#8211; the fontname database needed a refresh. After running<\/p>\n<div class=\"codecolorer-container text default\" style=\"overflow:auto;white-space:nowrap;width:435px;\"><div class=\"text codecolorer\">updmap --verbose<\/div><\/div>\n<p>from an administrator command line under Windows 7 gave me back the nice output which everyone expects from LaTeX:<\/p>\n<figure id=\"attachment_1494\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-1494\" style=\"width: 300px\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/20150302_xelatex_bitmapped_nomore.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/20150302_xelatex_bitmapped_nomore-300x152.png\" alt=\"Restored vectorized output of math symbols with XeLaTeX.\" width=\"300\" height=\"152\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-1494\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/20150302_xelatex_bitmapped_nomore-300x152.png 300w, https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/20150302_xelatex_bitmapped_nomore-150x76.png 150w, https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/20150302_xelatex_bitmapped_nomore-400x203.png 400w, https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/20150302_xelatex_bitmapped_nomore.png 838w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/a><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-1494\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Restored vectorized output of math symbols with XeLaTeX.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have now been using XeLaTex exclusively for quite a while for all my LaTeX work, which essentially means for everything: lecture notes, lecture slides, lab instructions, letters, reports,&#8230; For some shorter time the symbols in my equations would show up ok on screen but a bit blurry on printouts. I was looking for the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1493,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[22,8,27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1492","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-computers_en","category-everything_en","category-science_en","entry","has-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/03\/20150302_xelatex_bitmapped.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p48grL-o4","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1492"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2419,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1492\/revisions\/2419"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1493"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1492"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1492"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sciencetronics.com\/greenphotons\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1492"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}