# Substituting Symbol font for Mathematica's custom font in exported plots and other graphics

Mathematica includes some custom fonts that allow you to use a wide range of mathematical symbols in output. For example, one can write:

testdata = FoldList[0.99 #1 + #2 &, 0.,
RandomVariate[StableDistribution[1, 1.3, 1, 0, 0.5], 100]]
version1 = ListLinePlot[testdata,
PlotLabel -> "Shocks are StableDistribution, \[Beta]=1"]


The resulting graphic will show a nice beta ($\beta$) in the plot label, and the Mathematica-specific font will embed correctly in a PDF file, for example.

That's fine if your target format is PDF, or if the other users of the graphic have the Mathematica fonts installed. But what if you want to include the graphic in a PowerPoint for Windows files, and therefore need to use WMF or EMF format, but you can't guarantee that the viewers of the PowerPoint file have the Mathematica fonts installed? Is there a way to use the ubiquitous Symbol font instead?

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While there no doubt would be tricky ways to connect differently formatted text strings bound together, using Row or similar, it turns out that isn't necessary.
 And here I was working on a complicated answer. Maybe I'll finish it just for the exercise. – Mr.Wizard♦ Aug 5 '12 at 3:37 Sorry, I forgot to check the "answer your own question" tickbox before hitting "Post your answer", so the question came up first - my mistake, sorry. – Verbeia♦ Aug 5 '12 at 3:43 No problem; it made me think whereas reading your solution first might not have. – Mr.Wizard♦ Aug 5 '12 at 3:45 I'd like to point out that you should use this trick on innocently looking characters as the parenthesis set. Although in the ASCII set, mma replaces them with its own custom characters leading to sometimes very unpleasant surprises during presentations. – Sjoerd C. de Vries Aug 5 '12 at 8:08 @SjoerdC.deVries - you can avoid these problems with SetOptions[Graphics,BaseStyle -> {PrivateFontOptions -> {"OperatorSubstitution" -> False}} . I am sure I had another question that covered this but I can't seem to find ti. – Verbeia♦ Aug 5 '12 at 9:36