[Tex/LaTex] Bad math font quality in PDF

fontslyxmath-mode

I have a problem with bad font quality that only affects "math" environments.

I am writing a document with lyx 2.0.2 (OS: Ubuntu). The chosen class is "report". Since the normally used fonts were looking bad in the PDF output, I changed them to the following settings:

Roman: Bitstream Charter /
Sans Serif: Helvetica (92%) /
Typewriter: Courier

The general text looks great now, but the math text is very thin and bad to read.

My best guess was that Bistream Charter has no math font and it is replaced by some standard lyx font that looks bad but I couldn't find any working solution that only fixes the math font quality without messing up the general text font (e.g. I tried \usepackage{mathptmx} that did exactly that).

Can anybody help?

Best Answer

See the following sections of what's new in LyX 2.1:

TeX Fonts Additions

Furthermore, LyX now has a dedicated math font selection,
where you can prevent some fonts (such as Times and Palatino)
to automatically change the math font, and you can select
a dedicated math fonts. Currently the following math fonts
are supported:

Euler (via eulervm)
Iwona Math
Kurier Math
Libertine (via newtxmath)
MinionPro (via newtxmath)
Times Roman (via newtxmath)
URW Garamond (via newtxmath)

Basic support for Math OpenType fonts

LyX now has very basic support for the
unicode-math package, which allows the use of
OpenType fonts for math (similar to the non-TeX
text fonts LyX already supports). Currently, the
actual fonts still have to be loaded manually in
the preamble (if you do not want to use the
default, i.e. Latin Modern Math), but it is
planned to provide a selection of fonts in the
math font combo box.

Unfortunately, LyX 2.1 is not yet released. But it is in a pretty stable condition now. Since you're on Ubuntu, you can easily use the latest development version (this does not mess up your current LyX install because it uses a 2.1 suffix). Install lyx2.1 from the daily PPA as described here.

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