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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.
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!
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?
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."
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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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