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New Royalty-Free Fonts for Scientific Writing/Publishing

Posted by timothy on from the conveying-meaning-through-shape dept.

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.

33 comments

  1. First scientific post by MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM · · Score: -1

    It`s a fact

  2. The real question is... by MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM · · Score: -1

    Will these fonts be supported under Microsoft Office XP?

  3. No modification? by MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM · · Score: -1

    We are not allowed to modify these fonts? What would Richard Stallman say?

  4. Scientific genitals? by MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM · · Score: -1

    Can I publish a photocopy of my butt with these fonts?

  5. Lazy post by MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM · · Score: -1

    This message posted with minimal effort.

  6. One for the CLIT by MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM · · Score: -1

    I dedicate this post for the CLIT

    I own this thread baby

  7. Scientific invention by MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM · · Score: -1

    Frink: "And these should give you the grounding you'll need in Thermal dynamics, hyper-mathermatics, and of course microcalerfragelistics"
    Homer: "Look, I just want to know how to invent things... tell me"
    Frink: "All you have to do is think of things that people need, but which don't exist yet
    Homer: "you mean, like an electric blanket mobile?"
    Frink: "well.. possibly.... or you could take something that already exists and find a new use for it like.."
    Homer: "Hamburger ear muffs!"
    Frink: "Umm, well, I suppose that would qualify with..."
    Homer: "Thanks... sucker!"
    Frink: "Alright, just stay calm Frinky. These babies will be in the store while he's still grappling with the pickle matrix"

  8. I'm lost in the fourth dimension by MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM · · Score: -1

    Where are all the kikes and queers gone?

  9. IF I EVER MEET YOU by MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM · · Score: -1

    I WILL KICK YOUR ASS !!!

    It had to be said once in a lifetime.

  10. 10th post by MMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM · · Score: -1

    Does anybody know anything about the 10th post?

  11. Or alternatively by gowen · · Score: 1

    ... you can just use any of the usual TeXfonts, which just work.

    --
    Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
    1. Re:Or alternatively by Gamasta · · Score: 1

      So right, LaTex is already enough when you want to write math-stuff. Well, I don't know how to use, compile and whatever, but I believe it's close to that staroffice formula program.

      --
      reason defies logic
    2. Re:Or alternatively by fiziko · · Score: 2

      In its most basic form, LaTeX is similar to StarOffice. I think it's more correct to say that StarOffice's equation handling techniques are very similar to LaTeX's basic layouts. I could go on for a long time about this, but suffice it to say I used StarOffice for a year. Then I discovered LaTeX, and I haven't looked back since. It's a fantastic and versatile software package that does not require a mouse at any stage of the operation, and has very low system overhead.

      --
      - W. Blaine Dowler
      http://www.bureau42.com
  12. Distortion by ThereIsNoSporkNeo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Now, supposing I download myself a scientific document that uses this font. I, being a non-scientific type would not have this font. Does this mean I would end up with a bunch of ASCII 1-beginning of lowercase scrambled sentances?

    Knowing my luck they'll figure out the meaning of life mathematically, and I won't have the font to understand it.

    --
    With my dying breath, I curse Zoidberg!
    1. Re:Distortion by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      if it's a .tex or .dvi file, you'll need the stix package to compile/view it. If it's a .ps file or .pdf file, it will probably have the font embedded in it.

      If it's a web page, and you're using IE, you'll be prompted if you want to d/l the font.

      And if it's slashdot, well, the <font> tag isn't allowed, and unicode is stripped.

  13. Is something wrong with TeX? by lonenut · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Is something wrong with TeX? by larry+bagina · · Score: 2, Informative

      well, the stix project isn't just for tex, it will also include a postscript type 1 and truetype font, be unicode compatable, and will have 7,000+ symbols.

      TeX contains most math symbols, but is missing a lot of scientific symbols, and some people want to write their scientific paper in MS Word.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    2. Re:Is something wrong with TeX? by qbed · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      imagination is more important than knowledge --Albert Einstein-
    3. Re:Is something wrong with TeX? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      You can write scientific papers in word. I've seen someone do a whole astro-physics thesis in word. This, however, required that she break it up into a bunch of little sub-documents 'cause word wasn't up to handling 350 pages with lots-o-figures, hundreds-of-equations and 200 references. She ran screaming into the night when she went to turn in the written copy and the pointed out that it had to be double-spaced ... she had to fix every one of the freakin' documents by hand and futz with the figure alignment, fix the separate un-correlated list of figures. Wow, I'm glad I wrote my thesis in tex. Chapters written using LyX, 15 lines of perl to strip the pre-ramble's off each chapter, a top level .tex with some /makelistoffigures etc and /include's to bind it all together and a Makefile. Nothin' like sending the command "make doctor" and walking over to put the fancy paper in the printer.

  14. Good But by 4of12 · · Score: 2

    How's this better than Blue Sky's donation of PostScript Type 1 versions of TeX's Computer Modern fonts that previously were only available in MetaFont and bitmapped versions?

    I am glad an effort is being made to make the fundamental building blocks of language a truly open and free commodity. Commonly used fonts should be an open standard - except for exotic artistic fonts, proprietary holds on these building blocks are an undue brake on free expression and human communication. What's next, computer speech enunciations that are copyrighted and impossible to use without payment?

    --
    "Provided by the management for your protection."
    1. Re:Good But by apsmith · · Score: 2
      It's very similar to Blue Sky's donation - in fact inspired by it. What's different is:
      1. Times-Roman instead of Computer-Modern style
      2. Many more symbols.
      3. OpenType and Unicode support.
      --

      Energy: time to change the picture.

    2. Re:Good But by hagarum · · Score: 1

      It is always welcome to see high quality fonts
      freely contributed to the community. While I
      think the type1 CM fonts (and relatives) from
      the American Math Society and from others are
      quite good, and I'm not really interested in
      using Times based font set myself, this is
      never-the-less, a useful contribution.

      A distressing number of societies are asking
      their authors to submit in Times/Times Roman
      and its ilk, despite the lack of beauty in these
      fonts.

      I am currently assembling a proceedings, and we,
      at our sponsoring societies request, asked
      authors to use Times. There are basically two
      reasons for this:

      It is deemed important to have a unified look,
      and Times is most easily available to a wide
      range of platforms and software.

      Most authors are unfortunately creating their
      papers in MS Word (and converting to PDF, our
      required format), and the default font for a
      Word installation is Times. Few authors ever
      bother to change this or look at other fonts.
      You can criticize them if you wish, but they
      are not paid to fuss with fonts, and if they
      can say what they need to with minimum fuss
      using the defaults, they have no motivation
      to consider alternatives.

      I must comment also on the matter of embedding
      fonts. I think all fonts should be embedded
      in Type 1 or similar outline format. It
      is the only way to be sure. A number of papers
      that we have received as PDFs do not display
      quite right because their authors have different
      fonts than I do---even slightly different
      "Times" fonts. And papers from Asia, even when
      in English, invariably contain glyphs from
      Asian fonts---apparently even spaces, digits and
      some symbols like = signs might be pulled out
      of an Asian font and sneak into a submission with
      the author none the wiser.

      There is no way for authors to know what fonts
      their readers will have, either today or 10
      years or 50 years from now. There is no chance
      that any set of "standard fonts" will meet all
      needs, and there is little chance that most
      authors whose primary job is science will take
      the time to become familiar with what fonts are
      "standard" and which are not. They frankly assume that *whatever* they have, everyone will
      have.

      If a PDF paper is to replace a paper paper
      it should contain as much information as
      reasonable to describe itself. Embedding
      outline (not bitmapped) fonts does not result in
      unreasonably large PDF files, and it ensures
      that the readers will see what the author
      intends.

  15. Open Source Development HOW-TO by poopbot by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Offtopic

    Credits: onby

    1. Introduction

    As everyone knows, Open Source software is the wave of the future. With the market share of GNU/Linux and *BSD increasing every day, interest in Open Source Software is at an all time high.

    Developing software within the Open Source model benefits everyone. People can take your code, improve it and then release it back to the community. This cycle continues and leads to the creation of far more stable software than the 'Closed Source' shops can ever hope to create.

    So you're itching to create that Doom 3 killer but don't know where to start? Read on!

    2. First Steps
    The most important thing that any Open Source project needs is a Sourceforge page. There are tens of thousands of successful Open Source projects on Sourceforge; the support you receive here will be invaluable.

    OK, so you've registered your Sourceforge project and set the status to '0: Pre-Thinking About It', what's next?

    3. Don't Waste Time!

    Now you need to set up your SourceForge homepage. Keep it plain and simple - don't use too many HTML tags, just knock something up in VI. Website editors like FrontPage and DreamWeaver just create bloated eye-candy - you need to get your message to the masses!

    4. Ask For Help

    Since you probably can't program at all you'll need to try and find some people who think they can. If your project is a game you'll probably need an artist too. Ask for help on your new Sourceforge pages. Here is an example to get you started:

    "Hi there! Welcom to my SorceForge page! I am planing to create a Fisrt Person Shooter game for Linux that is going to kick Doom 3's ass! I have loads of awesome ideas, like giant robotic spiders! I need some help thouh as I cant program or draw. If you can program or draw the tekstures please get in touch! K thx bye!"

    Thousands of talented programmers and artists hang out at Sourceforge ready to devote their time to projects so you should get a team together in no time!

    5. The A-Team

    So now you have your team together you are ready to change your projects status to '1: Pre-Bickering'. You will need to discuss your ideas with your team mates and see what value they can add to the project. You could use an Instant Messaging program like MSN for this, but since you run Linux you'll have to stick to e-mail.

    Don't forget that YOU are in charge! If your team doesn't like the idea of giant robotic spiders just delete them from the project and move on. Someone else can fill their place and this is the beauty of Open Source development. The code might end up a bit messy and the graphics inconsistant - but it's still 'Free as in Speech'!

    6. Getting Down To It

    Now that you've found a team of right thinking people you're ready to start development. Be prepared for some delays though. Programming is a craft and can take years to learn. Your programmer may be a bit rusty but will probably be writing "hello world" programs after school in no time.

    Closed Source games like Doom 3 use the graphics card to do all the hard stuff anyhow, so your programmer will just have to get the NVidia 'API' and it will be plain sailing! Giant robot spiders, here we come!

    7. The Outcome

    So it's been a few years, you still have no files released or in CVS. Your programmer can't get enough time on the PC because his mother won't let him use it after 8pm. Your artist has run off with a Thai She-Male. Your project is still at '1: Pre-Bickering'...

    Congratulations! You now have a successful Open Source project on Sourceforge! Pat yourself on the back, think up another idea and do it all again! See how simple it is?

    - poopbot: who doesn't like scat?

  16. Yes, there is. by g4dget · · Score: 4, Informative
    TeX fonts are not PostScript or TrueType fonts. That causes all sorts of practical problems.

    For example, there are lots and lots of LaTeX papers out there in PDF format that were created with dvips and pstopdf, and the results are just awful. Papers with embedded TeX fonts are also very large.

    In fact, many people nowadays just use PDFTeX, and it would be good to have fonts that go with that natively.

    Now, you could convert TeX fonts to PostScript or TrueType. But typographically, they are not really all that nice.

    1. Re:Yes, there is. by rjw57 · · Score: 1
      TeX fonts are not PostScript or TrueType fonts. That causes all sorts of practical problems.

      Actually you can get a set of Adobe Type 1 fonts for LaTeX from the AMS. You can then make TeX use these standard PostScript Type 1 fonts in the PDFs it produces. More details here and here. You can also make LaTeX use the standard PostScript fonts for its body by using the \usepackage{times} directive in the preamble.

      --
      Rich
  17. computer modern, and missing characters by apsmith · · Score: 4, Informative
    Since I'm involved in the project I guess I'll comment...

    We would happily use TeX for everything, except for two fundamental problems, and a few more superficial ones. First the fundamental problems:
    • The standard TeX fonts are Computer Modern (Knuth's invention) - these are lighter and "looser" than the standard text typefaces (Adobe Times Roman in particular), and text becomes uglier and slightly harder to read when the two types of fonts are used together in the same document.
    • The standard Tex fonts are also missing a lot of special symbols that scientific publishers have, over the years, had to create for themselves. It's impossible to capture every special character that a mathematician or physicist may decide to invent for some particular purpose, but we've managed to include in the description of the font, and in the latest Unicode version (3.2) essentially all the special characters we could find that have received repeated use in scientific communications. If more appear later we'll get them added to the font. The idea is to be comprehensive.
    The more superficial problems are, first that TeX distributions suffer from wild inconsistencies in what particular fonts are available - early experiences with making font-less PDF files (or even DVI files) that relied on users having a TeX font distribution available to them for display were essentially total failures. And second, TeX is unfortunately not all that widely used even by scientists and engineers... Another side problem is the way TeX is limited to a small number of 256-character font files (with further restrictions on tfm files) - what we're planning is to have all 8000 or so glyphs available in 4 OpenType fonts (regular, bold, italic, bold italic) - of course to use with TeX it will have to be broken out into a few dozen 256-character Type-1 font files.

    The goal here is to be able to distribute scientific content in XML format, with the mathematical content marked up in a standard way such as MathML, and special characters treated properly as entities within Unicode, and then have essentially any conforming application (web browsers, Star Office, MSWord one hopes...) display the content correctly and reliably.
    --

    Energy: time to change the picture.

    1. Re:computer modern, and missing characters by nagora · · Score: 2
      ...lighter and "looser" than the standard text typefaces (Adobe Times Roman in particular),

      Times is not a standard text typeface, it is a standard newspaper typeface and is buck-ugly and tiresome to read on normally proportioned pages. NEVER use Times as a body face unless you're being charged a great deal too much for your paper or postage!

      TWW

      --
      "Encyclopedia" is to "Wikipedia" what "Library" is to "Some people at a bus stop"
    2. Re:computer modern, and missing characters by apsmith · · Score: 2

      Sounds like you haven't been reading any scientific journals lately :-)

      --

      Energy: time to change the picture.

  18. Embedded fonts by nucal · · Score: 2
    If it's a .ps file or .pdf file, it will probably have the font embedded in it.

    This is probably the key point ... all of the sponsors of this font are scientific publishing houses that are already heavily into using Abobe .pdf files for online publishing. Having a standardized scientific font is one more step towards a uniform online publishing format. Whether this should have been based on .pdf files or not is another issue - it is certainly not my favorite format, but it looks like we're stuck with it.

  19. New Century Schoolbook by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Use it if you have it. Otherwise, try Bookman.
    Headers can be Ariel Bold. No more than one serif
    font and one sans serif font in a document please!

  20. TeX distributions; source; sans serif by bcrowell · · Score: 2
    What you're doing is great -- there is strong need for this!

    Are you using MetaFont to create the fonts? If so, will the sources be available?

    Could you explain a little more about the rationale for creating an entirely new TeX distribution? teTeX has had trouble staying up to date, but what's wrong with TeXLive? Does it really make sense to reduplicate their effort?

    Lastly, I'm disappointed that there's no mention of creating a sans serif math font. Any chance that you'll make one?

    --
    Find free books.
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    - poopbot: for all your crapflooding needs
  22. No... by SpiffyMarc · · Score: 1

    What's next, is if Microsoft throws their muscle into the font arena with the new FontAsAService technology:

    Monthly Font Summary
    You looked at Comic Sans MS 24 times
    You looked at Tahoma 13 times

    You owe: $12.35

    Man, Adobe would be all over that!