Invisible \[Conjugate] glyph in the linux frontend

Question

I have a very annoying problem. The Conjugate glyph (*) does not show when I type.
That is, if I type \[Conjugate] or ⋮co⋮ then no character appears on the screen, although the conjugation operator is definitely there and working.

I'm running Mathematica 8 under Fedora. Here's a screenshot:

So far, it's the only character that I have noticed missing. Any ideas?

Answer 1

You need to make a backup and then modify the UnicodeFontMapping.tr file:

FileNameJoin[{$InstallationDirectory, "SystemFiles", "FrontEnd", 
              "TextResources", "UnicodeFontMapping.tr"}]

Look for the line

0xF3C8      N       6       0xad        # \[Conjugate]

and modify it to something like

0xF3C8      N       1       0x2a        # *

---

Thanks go to ragfield for providing this workaround on stackoverflow.

---

Aside: In February 2011, I contacted WRI tech support about two linux specific Mathematica 8 frontend bugs/regressions. The non-visible \[Conjugate] discussed above and the bad typesetting in fractions. Here's images showing the latter

The helpful tech support response was simply:

These are known problems with the FrontEnd on Linux, which our developers hope to address in a future release of Mathematica.

and that I'll be "notified when the issues are resolved"...

---

Back to the aside: Both of the Linux front-end bugs mentioned in the previous aside have been fixed in the first version 9 release.