XeTeX and your math is bitmapped?

Bitmapped math in XeLaTeX output.

I have now been using XeLaTex exclusively for quite a while for all my LaTeX work, which essentially means for everything: lecture notes, lecture slides, lab instructions, letters, reports,…

For some shorter time the symbols in my equations would show up ok on screen but a bit blurry on printouts. I was looking for the culprit in all different directions: settings in my PDF readers, font download to the printer, the printer itself,…

Today I finally decided thtat it was enough and that I finally should find the source of the problem. And see there: XeLaTeX incorporated bitmapped symbols into my PDFs:

Bitmapped math in XeLaTeX output.
Bitmapped math in XeLaTeX output.

A quick search on Google showed that Was not alone with this observation, but the different solutions did not really work out for me, e.g. the usage of mathspec. But then I found this one on StackExchange: http://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/204688/math-symbols-coming-out-blurry-bitmapped.

Indeed – the fontname database needed a refresh. After running

updmap --verbose

from an administrator command line under Windows 7 gave me back the nice output which everyone expects from LaTeX:

Restored vectorized output of math symbols with XeLaTeX.
Restored vectorized output of math symbols with XeLaTeX.

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