\bbalpha replaced by ff in equation

[baptiste]

I'm compiling a book where I use blackboard symbols with the mathbbol latex package as in this example,

---
title: "Untitled"
format: 
  pdf: 
    keep-tex: true
    include-in-header: 
       text: |
         \usepackage[bbgreekl]{mathbbol}
---

This is a Quarto book.

To learn more about Quarto books visit <https://quarto.org/docs/books>.

$$
\mathbf{E}^i= \bbalpha_j \mathbf{E}^j,
$$

Now something really strange happens when I run quarto render: the bbalpha symbol is replaced by ff

I'm stumped, because running xelatex manually on the tex file produces the expected output!

I haven't compiled this book for some time but I never noticed this problem before, so it might be a recent change in Quarto? I installed it this morning

quarto --version
99.9.9

(I'm guessing it's actually v1.3.113, at commit 63175b3)

Any idea as to what could be going on?

[baptiste]

Ah, nevermind, must be something to do with tinytex on my machine, since setting latex-tinytex: false solves it.

[cderv]

I was curious about this issue really. From my test, it is possible that you get two installation on your system (TinyTeX and another) and by deactivating TinyTeX you used the other one.

What I found is that I got the package bbold missing with the required fonts for mathbbol
Doc of mathbbol says

The mathbbol package exploits the bbold-fonts and the stmaryrd-fonts designed by Alan Jeffrey and Jeremy Gibbons.
Please find the bbold and stmary fonts on your nearest CTAN archive in directory tex-archive/fonts/bbold.

So I assume I need to install and I did

tlmgr install bbold

Font got installed, and then it was working.

Sharing in case it helps

[baptiste]

That does seem to be the issue, thanks. Odd for LaTeX to not complain when something is missing and just replace glyphs!

[cderv]

Odd for LaTeX to not complain when something is missing and just replace glyphs!

Yes I agree. It may be complaining in the log but not in an "error way" as usually when we detect missing fonts, we try to install them.

🤷