Missing characters in the maintable to display titles

[PierreMarchand20]

JabRef version 4 on macOS Sierra 10.12.6

With version 4, I noticed that a few characters do not work in the maintable. As you can see in the screenshot, math characters and the first letter in upper-case are missing.

[lenhard]

This might be down to the font you are using in main table. We are converting LaTeX to unicode there and some fonts have problems with displaying unicode symbols. Could you try playing around with different fonts here? Maybe one that sounds more math-savvy.

[PierreMarchand20]

I am using the default font (sans serif), and I tried a few other ones (arial, comic sans ms, courrier...) and I always have the same issue.

[lenhard]

We've discussed a similar problem here: #3008 Maybe Cambria Math does the trick?

[PierreMarchand20]

Sorry, I have not this font, do you have another suggestion ?

But notice that the first upper-cased letters are also not rendered, so I am not sure it is just a font issue. Besides, in version 3.8, I also used the default font (sans serif, I checked on another computer with JabRef 3.8) and there is no issue as you can see :

[Siedlerchr]

Well, at least in the preview it should be displayed correctly. Could you please add the bibtex code for the sample entry?

[PierreMarchand20]

This is a small sample illustrating my issue :

% Encoding: UTF-8

@Article{Boerm2007,
  author   = {Steffen B{\"{o}}rm},
  title    = {Data-sparse approximation of non-local operators by {$\mathcal{H}^2$}-matrices},
}

@Comment{jabref-meta: databaseType:bibtex;}

[Siedlerchr]

On Windows 10, setting Table font to Dialog (SEGOE UI) solves this for me:

[PierreMarchand20]

It did not solve this for me :

[Siedlerchr]

For Windows (since 8.1 or 10) the Segoe UI is used. For other math fonts check out here:
http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/mathematical_alphanumeric_symbols/fontsupport.htm
There are some OpenSource fonts which may be avaiable for Mac. I would vote to close this issue now, as it only depends on the font and OS.

[PierreMarchand20]

Well freeserif works for me. But I still do not understand why sans serif worked with version 3.8 and not with 4.0

[Siedlerchr]

@PierreMarchand20 Okay good to know! The reason is simple: We replaced the latex2unicode converter with a new parser which is more flexible and more advanced.

Would you mind editing the corresponding installation notes for Mac OS then by adding some info regarding the Font?
https://help.jabref.org/en/FAQosx

[PierreMarchand20]

I tried without success to find a font installed by default on macOS that supports unicode and math characters. It seems that we cannot avoid installing a new one, but luckily, it is pretty easy. Thank you for your answers 👍