Astronomy Symbols in TeX

I’ve been hoping to do up the MECH2210 orbital mechanics project in TeX, but first I had to work out how to do those special planet symbols. I tracked them down in a LaTeX symbol list (pdf) (page 68), in a package called mathabx. There’s also astronomy symbols in the wasysym and marvosym packages, which are included in texlive-fonts-recommended from the Ubuntu repositories, but their Earth and/or Sun symbols weren’t consistent with what we used in lectures.

The mathabx font isn’t included in any software repositories that I could see, so I downloaded it from the ctan.org catalogue and unzipped to my desktop. Installing it was a tad tricky, I worked from the README and a post in the Ubuntu forums.

$ cd /home/jack/Desktop/mathabx/
$ TEXMF=/usr/share/texmf-texlive

$ sudo mkdir $TEXMF/fonts/source/public/mathabx/
$ sudo cp source/*.mf $TEXMF/fonts/source/public/mathabx
$ sudo cp texinputs/mathabx.* $TEXMF/tex/generic/misc/

$ cd $TEXMF
$ sudo mktexlsr

Now in TeX…

\usepackage{mathabx}
...
$\Sun$ Sun
$\Earth$ Earth
$\Moon$ Moon
$\Venus$ Venus
$\Mars$ Mars

And tadah!

Planet symbols in TeX

Tags: MECH2210, TeX, Ubuntu, Uni