# \mathbb{Z} is not displayed correctly

The character \mathbb{Z} is not displayed correctly in my pdf-output: it is not a vector graphic, but a pixelated raster image. I have loaded the amssymb package and I am using Windows and MiKTeX.

I suppose I lack some fonds but which and how do I install them?

Edit to clarify my post:

Here is a minimal example

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{bbold}
\begin{document}
$\mathbb{Z}$
\end{document}


The actual problem comes from using bbold. Adding

\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{lmodern}


doesn't help.

• Could you provide a complete and minimal example code (any other packages you're loading?) The following seems to work fine here: \documentclass{article} \usepackage{amssymb} \begin{document} $\mathbb{Z}$ \end{document} – Juan A. Navarro Sep 27 '10 at 13:14
• Also have a look at this existing question (maybe a duplicate?) – Juan A. Navarro Sep 27 '10 at 13:22
• It could be as simple as an issue with the document viewer you are using. In the past I've had similar issues and it turned out to be that the default viewer used by an IDE didn't render the fonts very well, but they displayed as expected in e.g. Acrobat Reader. – Michael Underwood Sep 27 '10 at 15:46
• What about cm-super? Does installing it solve your problem? – Mateus Araújo Sep 28 '10 at 13:08

Possible answer: How about just using amssymb instead of bbold?

And now a non-answer but to help with the original question: On my system, I also got the pixelated font running pdflatex (from TeX Live on OSX) on the example from the OP. This is how the letter looks when running the code myself

This is how it looks in bbold documentation.

While running (and each time I tried with a different font size) I saw something like this on the output log

kpathsea: Running mktexpk --mfmode / --bdpi 600 --mag 1+120/600 --dpi 720 bbold12
mktexpk: Running mf-nowin -progname=mf \mode:=ljfour; mag:=1+120/600; nonstopmode; input bbold12
This is METAFONT, Version 2.718281 (TeX Live 2009)


I'm not an expert in fonts, but this seems to be creating the pixelated bitmaps for the font. Does anyone know how to actually fix this?

• Thank you, Juan, for elucidating my problem. Using amssymb is definitely a workaround. – Emerson Sep 27 '10 at 16:27
• looks like the bbold package is using traditional metafont (bitmap) fonts. I've found some type1 versions of the fonts online from the Y & Y legacy ( code.google.com/p/yytex ), but they are not part of texlive (yet?) – Taco Hoekwater Sep 27 '10 at 18:14