Wrong font display of symbols

[PatrickTeboul]

When typing any type of equation,: shows up as a PC wingding, = shows a diskette icon and all others are showing up in bizarre language machine. Looked at Regional settings under windows, changed the keyboard/country/language settings and still no normal display... Changed font under MatchCAD and still the same... What is wrong? See attached Word file example.

[TomGutman]

Most likely you have a lost (or corrupted) symbol font. That font is a part of Windows and you should be able to find and install it in the Windows installation material.

[PatrickTeboul]

Strange though that it happens only in Mathcad and in no other software...?

[RichardJ]

Which other software do you have that uses the symbol font? You can check it in Word or another word processor if you wish, but this is a problem that has come up many times. Reinstall the symbol font, and it will fix it. Richard

[PatrickTeboul]

It's not the "Symbol" font per say that I'm having trouble with, it's more the fact that any punctuation used to write a formula such as !@#$%^&*()_+<>,.? (which are displayed just fine here) just don't under the MatchCAD interface. Only the letters and the numbers are O.K.(see atttached file in the original post). I work with several under programs and MS Office software and never have any issues with any of my fonts. When in MathCAD, using ANY font (arial, times new roman, etc.) I get the same problem. Changing the keyboard settings to american english, canadian english, french canadian, etc. does not solve the problem. Changed the user regional & language settings, still useless...I'm using Windows XP so there should not be issues with the O/S. Should I try re-installing? Thanks for the reply by the way.

[RichardJ]

"Patrick Teboul" wrote:

Should I try re-installing?

[TomGutman]

When you type one of the special characters in Mathcad, you are not entering that character. Rather you are entering a code that inserts a Mathcad operator. Mathcad uses the symbol font for displaying its operators. You probably don't use any other software that uses the symbol font. The only other software that I'm aware of is Word's equation editor, end even then I'm not sure it applies to the most recent versions (which could use characters from any Unicode character set).

[PatrickTeboul]

I've uninstalled and reinstaleld the fonts from the Window Control settings. It asked for the original diskette from which it needed to get the files from /i386 directory. After completion I re-started MathCAD and typed a:=1 and the same thing happened as before. Can we play with the unicode settings somewhere?

[RichardJ]

It's not a unicode problem. The symbol font is not getting installed correctly, presumably because Windows sees a copy in the fonts folder and doesn't know it's corrupted. You will have to install by hand (which is not hard). see this thread for what to do and where to get a new copy of the font: http://www.ptc.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=4353&highlight=symbol.ttf Richard

[PatrickTeboul]

SOLVED! I made a search on "symbol" on my C:/ drive and it looks like Adobe installs it's own version of of it and maps it which creates conflicts with the original symbol font in my list of fonts (see attached). I decided to delete this one and see if the conflict would go away. It did! Hope however I did not mess up something else in another software. Thanks for the help guys.

[RichardJ]

Interesting. Although this has come up many times, you are the first person to post any evidence of how the font problem occurs in the first place. Richard

[plindhard]

This bug ended my high school ten years ago. Always though someone had deleted or manipulated the fonts, but I'd actually just installed Adobe for a web-project. Brilliant software.