Fixing Broken LaTeX Fonts in Leopard

By joel at Wed, Nov 28 2007 10:49am |

Some of you may notice that applications using Apple's PDF rendering engine under Leopard will not properly render certain documents created with LaTeX. It seems that in some cases, a corrupted font cache is to blame. To fix this problem execute the following commands in Terminal and then reboot:

sudo rm -rf `lsof | grep com.apple.ATS/annex.aux | grep Finder | cut -c 66-139`

sudo rm -rf /private/var/folders/*/*/-Caches-/com.apple.ATS

This tip originally came from Daniel Merl's website, which offers some additional teach tips for Leopard users.

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Mon, 2008-01-07 08:18 — mokalhor

solution to the problem with Latex equation editor and Leopard!!

This procedure works well on my macbook 13'', 2.16Ghz, and Leopard 10.5.1

Before:
I've installed the latest version of TexMac and Texshop
Latex equation editor (Lee), Latexit, dvips, dvipdf and all other programs involving tex and ps files worked very well with tiger 10.4.9

Next:
I've upgraded my Tiger 10.4.9 to Leopard 10.5.1 and pdf documents, as well as all tex and .ps softwares showed wrong/corrupted fonts, as many other users had talked about.

Solution for pdf dpcuments:
type these command from console than reboot...
sudo rm -rf `lsof | grep com.apple.ATS/annex.aux | grep Finder | cut -c 66-139`

sudo rm -rf /private/var/folders/*/*/-Caches-/com.apple.ATS

Solution for Lee, dvips, dvipdf, Latexit:
DON'T USE Lee ANYMORE!
remove Lee from your application. If you used it after rebooting, retype the commands above, remove Lee and reboot again.
Latexit works well every time (and not randomly, as with other users). If you run Lee and than Latexit, your fonts will be corrupted again. Don't use Lee anymore

Mon, 2008-01-21 13:51 — sam_kingston

Still problems...

I have the problem described above: fonts are doing crazy things in PDF files (both with Preview or Acrobat) and also in Word's equation editor. The same file will look different if I open it twice in a row with the same Application. This is the case both for the files I created with TeXShop or with files I downloaded. The problems disappear when I reboot or log out.

I deleted the font cache as you and others suggest (that's the only thing I saw on the web so far) but it did not work. I still get problems so perhaps one of the Applications is corrupting the font cache. Since I deleted the font cache I only used Preview, TeXShop, Camino with the PDF Browser plugin, Word, Thunderbird and iTunes.

There seems to be some discussion about the same problem on Apple's website, but without any clear solution.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6397974
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5867526&#5867526
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=5967361&#5967361

I have a MacBook 13' 2 GHz running with Mac OS 10.5.1 The fonts problem began when I upgraded from OS 10.4.9

Wed, 2008-01-23 09:39 — Maarten Sneep

LaTeXiT

LaTeXiT can use different typesetting modes, and several of them use dvips in the process (same with pstricks/pdftricks and psfrag/pdffrag). This explains why I haven't seen the issue, but even when using LaTeXiT, you should be careful which command-mode you are using. The default is safe.

Maarten

Tue, 2008-05-27 23:05 — mdreid

Possible solution

I've been struggling with similar problems under Leopard with weird fonts and Keynote crashing when exporting slides containing LaTeXiT generated PDFs. Even after deleting my font cache I still had trouble.

I wrote to the very helpful author of LaTeXiT, Pierre Chatelier, who suggested I use the font cache deletion technique above but also delete the LaTeXiT preference and history files:

$ rm ~/Library/Preferences/fr.club.ktd.latexit.plist

$ rm ~/Library/Application Support/LaTeXiT/history.dat

After doing this and restarting LaTeXiT, the equations it rendered looked slightly different (i.e., a different, more traditional LaTeX font was used) and putting these newly rendered equations into Keynote and then exporting worked without a hitch.

My best guess at the moment is that some other program that interacted with LaTeX (maybe LEE?) had set the default LaTeX font to something unusual (from memory it was sans-serif in my case) and one that other PDF programs couldn't handle.

--
Mark Reid
http://mark.reid.name

Fri, 2009-12-18 09:07 — Nancy Eaton

Fixing broken latex fonts in OS X

I followed these directions:

execute the following commands in Terminal and then reboot:

sudo rm -rf `lsof | grep com.apple.ATS/annex.aux | grep Finder | cut -c 66-139`
sudo rm -rf /private/var/folders/*/*/-Caches-/com.apple.ATS

AND IT WORKED!

I have no idea what those commands mean, but I followed the directions and I have no more problems when I use TeXShop to format my LaTex Documents. I am posting to let people know that it works in OS X also.

Fri, 2010-01-01 07:58 — nationman

Hi I am having a problem

Hi

I am having a problem executing latex equation editor. i have to use because i use keynote.

first it didn't even execute and then `i played with the path in the preferences and now there is an output but the font is bizarre and he does not execute some commands at all. anyone with an answer or some experience. I think I am messing up the path

thanks

Sahraoui