Stix Scientific Fonts Reach Beta Release

starseeker writes "At long last, the STIX project has posted a Beta release of their scientific fonts. The mission of the STIX project has been the 'preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats.' The result is a font set containing thousands of characters, and hopefully a font set that will become a staple for scientific publishing. Among other uses, it has long been hoped that this would make the wide scale use of MathML in browsers possible. Despite rather long delays the project has persisted and is now showing concrete results."

Comments

arg

[Anonymous Coward]

Why exactly was it necessary to link to the user agreement rather than say an example of the fonts or something a tad more useful?

Re:awesome

[ScriptedReplay]

Times New Roman can type every single character on the character map, which is a FUCKING LOT of scientific characters.

Umm, no. It's a fucking lot of Latin characters, but pitiful wrt scientific notation. Check out the AMS symbol fonts in LaTeX if you want to get a clue.

Small font sizes

[ortholattice]

I took a quick look at the Stix fonts - only a few samples, so maybe I'm overlooking something - but they seem to have the same problem that plagues almost all recently designed fonts, free and otherwise: they don't render clean bitmaps at small sizes, when ClearType or other font smoothing is turned off. To me, smoothing often just doesn't work all that well for small point sizes. Sometimes it makes very small fonts nearly illegible that are easily readable in bitmap form (e.g. Mono Andale at 8pt where it is essentially impossible to distinguish a period and a comma with smoothing turned on).

Compare these to the fonts of yore, such as Times or Arial or essentially any font that existed in the early Mac and Windows days. The font designers took great care to ensure that bit maps were customized for best appearance at small point sizes, given the inherent limitation of the black-and-white screens and resolution available then.

Now it seems it is universally assumed that everyone will have smoothing turned on. Modern fonts may look professional and polished at larger point sizes, but the unsmoothed bitmap versions of many of them at small sizes tend to look rough and amateurish, with ugly artifacts and inconsistent line widths and sometimes barely legible. Even the smoothed ones aren't necessarily great at small sizes - the smoothing can make them blurry with poor contrast, unlike the crisp black and white of well-designed bitmaps.

Perhaps I am alone, but I am more efficient working with small font sizes for things like programming, so I can have the maximum amount of information simultaneously available on the screen. So I almost always have smoothing turned off and use old-fashioned (and typically mono) fonts that have clean, carefully crafted bitmaps suited for that purpose. But when I switch to web browsing, if the site sports a trendy font and I have smoothing turned off, it can be an eyesore.