# Invisible \[Conjugate] glyph in the linux frontend

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?

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No such bug shows in Mathematica 8.0.4 on Win7. Can you try following this and let us know if it helped? forums.wolfram.com/mathgroup/archive/2008/Feb/msg00035.html –  Vitaliy Kaurov Feb 2 '12 at 10:00
I have the same problem as well; I'm running Mathematica 8.0.1 on Xubuntu 11.10 . –  Ｊ. Ｍ. Feb 2 '12 at 11:01

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.

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