Why do some symbolic math expressions show as broken images when Maple T.A. is installed on Linux?
Maple T.A. relies on a font server to create images from MathML expressions so that they can be displayed in a browser. Only some MathML fonts are available natively to Java and those fonts which are not available to Java are supplied with Maple T.A. To make these extra fonts available requires that Tomcat has access to a font server. On a headless system, this can be accomplished with xvfb (a virtual frame buffer). Another option is to start Tomcat from an xterm window (running Tomcat this way ensures that it has access to a graphics environment). The following instructions are provided in the Maple T.A. Administrator Guide: 2.1.7 Providing an X Server under Linux and Solaris Under Linux and Solaris, Maple T.A. requires an X Server to provide a graphics environment needed to render mathematical symbols and graphs. The minimal way to accomplish this is with a virtual frame buffer. We recommend xvfb. A simple implementation is to insert the following into /etc/init.d/tomcatx, preceding
