I complied Abiword using the BLFS book. All of the major plugins work except equations. I also could not get the rsvg plugin to compile, so I left it out. I don't know if this is causing the problem.

Equations is an unusual plugin in that it is built on some very old external libraries that are no longer maintained. You have to compile gdome2, gmetadome, and gtkmathview in that order. To get them to compile with recent GNU C++ compilers, you have to search the internet for patches. Abiword uses LaTeX at the back end and MathML via gtkmathview to render the equations on the screen. What is not mentioned is that Abiword also uses cairo and pango, both of which I had already compiled following the book. And as a long time LaTeX user, I had already compiled Texlive using BLFS.

However, the equations are severely distorted. It replaces any object that it has trouble interpreting by the letter Z. The first attachment shows what I mean. If I export the document to a pdf file, the distortions are still there.

What is odd is that if I select "View in a browser" from the Abiword menu, it displays more or less correctly, as the second attachment shows.

Based on a lot of googling, I installed Dejavu Math Tex gyre, Latin Modern math, and STIX fonts and added them to the font cache.

If anyone has gotten Abiword to work in math mode, I would appreciate some insight. Or maybe time to switch to Libreoffice.

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I don't know if this will help, but did you install the x11 legacy font libraries? libXfont, bdftopcf, etc.

No I didn't. I have to look into that.

In Debian, Abiword equation rendering works perfectly. The Debian folks did a great job compiling this package and its dependencies. So I looked at the Debian Sid rules file to examine their configure flags. The two major differences are that they excluded mathview plugin and they enabled gobject-introspection. They also included support for Wordperfect which I don't need. When I included gobject-introspection, I get icu57 errors. When I fix those by installing an older icu library, I get other errors.

Fixing this could be the key.

Yea, you pretty much need to build things with the --enable-introspection flag if it's available, whether you plan to install Gnome or not. Too many things use it. I'd try the old font libraries first, they're called "x-org legacy" in the BLFS book. If those fonts aren't OTF/TTF then they may not render correctly without it.

This is one of the big grumps about Linux, lack of a stable API for very core stuff like fonts. It's a major complaint, and rightfully so, from the Wayland detractors too, as it does nothing to address the issues. What is really needed is another layer of base rendering libraries between Wayland and it's clients that handle things like fonts and basic widgets in a uniform, non-desktop/window manager specific way. Unfortunately, that stuff isn't "cool" so, most of the development is on the desktops themselves.

One more thing... I see AbiWord uses Boost. Did you add --with-icu to the ./bootstrap line when you built Boost?

There are several packages like Boost and libxml2 that will ignore ICU unless it is specifically switched in the configure line.

...and to think someone on here told me modifying the default configure switches was pointless. Only pointless if you want to find that some features don't work or are greyed out once everything is installed. Some don't even show up at all unless all of the requirements were available at build time.

I forgot one more thing on your introspection issue. An easy way to see if it is available as a configure option is to:

./configure --help | grep intro

Before you use the configure string from the BLFS Book, if it comes up, usually --enable-introspection=[no/auto/yes], you know what to do. There are literally dozens of packages that need this, including stuff like Cairo.

No I did not add --with-icu to the boost bootstrap line. Looks like I have to recompile Boost.

Or I might start using LibreOffice.