New Royalty-Free Fonts for Scientific Writing/Publishing

stotterj writes: "Writing anything up in science almost always means changing fonts a lot to use all the characters necessary for formulas and units (times, symbol, arial). This is annoying. People at STIX Fonts are putting together a universal font set that already has the special characters built in and can be used from writing to publishing. The fonts that result from the project will be made available for free." The site says that "In particular. the STIX project will create a TeX implementation that TeX users can install and configure with minimal effort." The licensing for these fonts (discussed in the FAQ) will allow free use, but not modification.

Comments

Is something wrong with TeX?

[lonenut]

Is there an issue with using the fonts which come with TeX? This is a standard tool for creating papers in math and physics departments everywhere (many also use LaTeX).

I never had to pay Donald Knuth to use TeX, and I certainly never licensed the included fonts. Is there a legal issue with using the fonts included with TeX, or is this all an attempt to make some free fonts which are friendly to non-markup text processing tools like MS Word?

If the latter is the case, what is the point of releasing these fonts in a TeX usable form at all?

Re:Is something wrong with TeX?

[qbed]

Speaking from the biased position of a mathematician, noone in their right mind would go back to using MS Word after using Tex/LaTeX. However, Meta fonts are enormous (these are the fonts used by TeX).

Consider that TeX does not allow for typesetting in all languages at the moment. Only the latinised languages are supported properly, though there are some hacks for similar non-latinised languages.

There is a project that aims to remedy this called Omega (see the CTAN archive) with its own macro wrapper called Lambda. But one of the things that is needed for this is a solid set of fonts. Maybe (though I feel I should be somewhat cautious here) these STIX fonts will be it.