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

A *legal* equivalent would be much appreciated

[timothy]

By that I don't mean that the Stix fonts are illegal -- far from it!

What I mean is that the legal profession could use a similarly open-licensed set of fonts for all aspects of the legal process, so that (among other things) it would be one notch* easier to have completely open source case-management / report-creation software at all layers of the legal system. (I'm thinking of American courts, law offices, etc, right now, but not reason why this should apply only within the U.S.)

Something as trivial (and as tangential to content) and which particular font is chosen is one thing that I'd love to see gone. You might be amazed at how difficult it is to computerize even some very busy court systems / law offices (partly because they're busy). I'm doing a clinical at a defender's office with quite a brisk business, and the computer situation is straight out of a Kafka -- lots of PCs are 8 or more years old, there's no reliable Internet service over which to do research (besides which, the computers are so virus-ful that this wouldn't happen anyhow, because browsers don't work on them anyhow. Or, should I say, "browser." Guess which one?) Oh, and installing any superior software is "against policy." Also, offices aroudn the state (New Jersey) are being flopped over to Word, despite everyone preferring an ages-old version of WordPerfect, "for consistency." Goodbye to years of macros -- many documents must be literally retyped.

So most of the above rant has nothing to do with fonts, I realize -- but it does have to do with supporting anything which would ease the replacement of proprietary junkware with something more open on as many fronts as possible.

timothy

* For whatever value of "notch" you think makes sense, that is.