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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."
chicken
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?
Well good, they needed a font set that had all the symbols you'd ever want to type in science. Only one little problem though...how do you type it? You'd either need a seriously huge keyboard, someone to memorize thousands of key combinations on a current keyboard, or an on screen keyboard program. Each of those options is unacceptably slow or difficult. Plus right now, we have alt codes that almost nobody knows about or uses and the character map built into XP with searchability. So um...what did they invent that we don't already have other than a font?
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Can't find anything useful on the website (without giving e-mail address), here's why: <a class="starter" accesskey="5" title="STIX Beta Test" href="#">STIX Beta Test</a>
Read that fscking website, you idiot! Those fonts are primarily meant for TeX-based applications, for example LaTeX. Yes, LaTeX has umpteen gazillion packages for writing all those exotic mathematical operators, but STIX Fonts provides them totally consistent outlook.
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen - http://iki.fi/juhtolv
I am not sure what you mean by "consistent outlook". If you mean a consistent appearance, that is what TeX is for in the first place.
I suppose it has something to do with the "openness" of the fonts, or something like that, but haven't complete (or nearly so) scientific font sets been around for a long time? Other posters have mentioned the TeX collections, and there's also Mathematica's fonts: http://support.wolfram.com/mathematica/systems/windows/general/latestfonts.html.
Basically: what's new about the Stix font set?
I'm an amateur typographer and a typophile. I certainly see the need and use for this fontset. However, based on the nature of the comments that I've seen so far, I'm going to sit this discussion out. (Hint: several of you guys are making yourselves look like idiots.)
The one question I have about these fonts is this: Are they designed to sit well in various types of body copy? That is, do the weight and color of the STIX Fonts blend in well with the various serifs and san serifs typefaces used in different scientific publications?
Try using openoffice's math editor, it blows away Equation Editor. Equation editor sucks, requires too much clicking. OpenOffice's can be done entirely with the keyboard, so it is much faster. Mathematica's entering system is pretty good too. Accomplished Tex writers can churn out equations as fast as they can think them.
With all the other systems, there is a learning curve, but you are trading a little bit of work now to learn them versus a lot of wasted work over the course of being lazy and using equation editor. Time to step up to the plate.
It's called TeX, learn it once, and reap the benefits for the rest of your life. Instead of dicking around with Equation Editor's error-prone, piece of shit GUI, you can typeset good looking mathematics very quickly and easily. Plus, it's trivial to integrate with other tools. For example, when I work on a simulation in Matlab, I have the program generate TeX code and EPS images for the results and dump them into a file. Then I use \input{} to refer to those results from the main body of my paper. This way if I rerun the simulation for whatever reason, the paper automatically picks up the updated results. Also, TeX's code display facilities allow me to make nice code listings that are again kept up to date with the actual Matlab code of the simulation. Also, on top of all that, TeX outputs professional-looking PDFs, not the raggedy-text shit that Word excretes.
Before you complain about TeX being complicated: even my younger brother, whose still in high-school, figured out (with no help from me!) what a piece of shit Equation Editor is, and switched to TeX. Equation Editor, like Word itself, is barely sufficient for writing high-school lab reports, much less university-level science and engineering work!
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I am glad to see the license for the fonts being published clearly and prominently so it can be reviewed along with the fonts. I recall submitting critique of an earlier license for the fonts, pointing out that the license didn't allow modification (important for improvement) or subsetting (important in PDFs). It was unfortunate that these fonts were aimed at an academic audience, people who were remarkably likely to want to improve the fonts to suit their needs, yet were disallowed from doing so under the old license. The revised license appears to have remedied my issues with their previous license; this license allows modification, subsetting, copying, and distribution (including commercial distribution) all with remarkably mild restrictions that (in my opinion) would not stop this from being a Free Software license.
Because the license allows distribution of the fonts and "the associated documentation files", you could probably find a copy of the font software somewhere that doesn't make you go through a click-through, as well as a sample rendering.
Digital Citizen
But nowadays it does not work like that in practice. Many of those LaTeX-packages have some fonts that do not sit well with some other fonts that may be in same LaTeX-document. One reason for creating STIX Fonts is to rectif that situation.
On the other hand, those default fonts of TeX (Computer Modern) are not very suitable for reading from screen. STIX Fonts have Times-like appearance.
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen - http://iki.fi/juhtolv
It seems like for a lot of the journals out there, it is a Word/Mathtype vs LaTeX world out there. Anyone seen any acceptance of Open Office/Math Editor?
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They don't memorize any shortcuts, they just write down the pronunciation (either in Pinyin/romanization in the RPC or in Bopomofo in Taiwan) and then choose from the possible homophones, usually helped with a predictive system. It's similar in Japan as well.
There's nothing new about being able to produce good-looking math output using free software and free fonts; people have been doing that for decades using tex/latex, and the relevant fonts are free enough that they can be distributed with linux distributions.
What's really new and important about STIX is that it will work better with technologies other than latex, especially web browsers. Mathml has been kicking around since 1999, but browser supported has always sucked to high heaven. One of the things holding browsers back from implementing mathml well has been the issue of fonts. Mathml is xml, so it naturally should use unicode. Latex dates back to long before the creation of unicode, so all its fonts are in obscure non-unicode encodings. The approach so far has been to cobble together something that works by building a Frankenstein's monster made out of various fonts that weren't designed to look good together, and that come from various sources. Even though Firefox now has mathml enabled by default, and I have the recommended witches' brew of fonts installed on my linux box, firefox still nags me about its fonts every time it needs to render mathml. The only way this is going to get better is with the STIX fonts.
For an example of how screwed up things have been, take a look at the archives of the Wikiproject Mathematics talk page on Wikipedia. WP's software uses software that renders LaTeX math into bitmaps, and that software has only very limited mathml output functionality, which is not actually being used. There was a project by a math grad student at harvard to make something better, called blahtex, which would have allowed mathml to be output as well. A user who was interested in mathematical topics, and who had Firefox, could set a preference on his WP account so that math would always be displayed to him in mathml, which would look much better (both on the screen and on paper) than the crappy screen-resolution bitmaps. Well, he wrote the thing, got it working great, tested it extensively on a huge number of equations harvested from actual WP pages, built support for it among WP editors. And when all was said and done, the Mediawiki developers wouldn't take his code. Basically the reasoning seems to have been that browser support for mathml sucked, so there was no point in disturbing mediawiki's codebase for a feature nobody cared about.
Ouch.
It's been a real chicken-and-egg thing. Since mathml support in IE requires a plugin, nobody's bothered to put much effort into making mathml content. MS's motivation for building mathml support into IE has been low, because nobody was using mathml, and the fonts weren't available. Although firefox has mathml support, it's extremely buggy, and the motivation to fix the bugs has been low, because nobody was using mathml, and the fonts weren't available. The fact that STIX is finally coming out may finally generate some excitement among developers about making mathml into a going concern on the web.
Anothing thing holding everyone back is that people are still expecting to be able to write html as if it was 1995, with no quotes around attributes, unbalanced tags, etc. That isn't going to work for xml-based technologies like mathml, and in fact firefox won't render mathml if it occurs on a page that's not valid xhtml. That seems to have been one of the big factors holding back adoption of mathml by mediawiki, for example, because the html code generated by mediawiki isn't valid xml.
I'm really hoping that sometime soon square roots won't look messed up on the screen in firefox's rendering of mathml, and a printed mathml web page won't look so horrible.
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Not to mention Latex. It takes me like ten times as much time to edit equation in MS Word or OO.org. Of course mathematica exports to AMS-LaTeX.
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They will have a big job replacing the computer modern fonts, especially if they don't make convenient LaTeX packeges to load the fonts.
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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.
Can anyone point at a good reference.
I'm familiar with Type1, Postscript, bitmap, TrueType; but not OTF.
-- Rich
LyX is a nice frontend program that simplifies LaTeX input
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To be fair Mathtype has plenty of keyboard shortcuts as well. However, LaTeX's macros are just so much more convenient when there are a lot of font changes and notations I have not decided on. Besides, the looks of papers written with Word/Mathtype just doesn't look quite "right" to me, even though I guess I have a pretty good grasp of Word's advanced features. Maybe this has something to do with Word's inability to insert line breaks inside inline equations and the strange line spacing. Finally, Word seems to get unstable when I have more than a hundred or so equations in a single document, which happens pretty often.
Some of the fonts apparently crash FontBook when previewed. It's too bad, since I was hoping for a good symbol font.
Now that is ironic. Although I disagree that Times is a better font for screen reading. It's all squishdy and pointy.
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I tried to teach myself TeX my freshman year of college, hell of a learning curve. Then I found LyX, if you're just learning TeX I'd recommend starting with LyX and exporting to .tex to see what all you can do with something TeX based and then moving onto writing just .tex
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If anything can do it, it'll be an initiative something like the STIX work.
In any case, Computer Modern is far from everyone's taste. Knuth did a great job designing a highly legible font that could both typeset mathematics elegantly and survive the scanning, photocopying and other abuse scientific papers tend to suffer. However, notwithstanding Knuth's personal preferences, aesthetically the Computer Modern set leaves a lot to be desired. Many people prefer a different style on paper, and on screen the lightness of the CM set is pretty horrible, as anyone who's tried to read a long PDF of a paper set using TeX can testify.
It's a shame that in a world where OpenType and Unicode are now commonplace, and where many professional fonts now come with glyphs for numerous different alphabets and numerous carefully tuned typographical features, it isn't yet common to supply matching glyphs for say the top 100 scientific symbols. I guess the market is just too specialised, and the current dominance of the TeX family means there's little commercial incentive for others to produce high quality scientific fonts. In that respect, having a high-quality, science-friendly font available for use with things like web pages surely must be a good thing. (Monospace fonts useful for typesetting computer programs currently suffer a similar lack of support, probably for the same reason.)
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I think I'd rather vote Grimlock.
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The project history is sort of amusing.. Originally scheduled for release in Summer 2005, the release date was delayed to Sept 2005, the Dec, then March 2006, then June. In July 2006 it was announced the fonts would be ready "in two weeks". Every two weeks since then, they've made announcements that it would be ready in two weeks more. (literally.. see their news page). Anyway, they must be happy it's almost done!
I love how none of the links on their web site's menu work.
I taught myself LaTeX in the first year of my Ph.D. Best thing I ever did. OO.org equations can be entered into the editor using a similar type of notation to TeX. I felt quite at home using OO.org after I understood the basics of LaTeX.
There really comes a point where the right tool for the job. A P.O.S word processor is great for hacking out a letter to aunt millie asking her about the weather in Kazakhstan. It certainly saves the hacking out the text into an editor and a 'make' phase of running the right LaTeX commands to get a printable version.
LaTeX is amazingly simple for enormously complex documents. You just define your format requirements at the top of the TeX sources and then hammer in text; assigning tags to hint at the layout engine what you need it to do for you. If you need to change the entire document format/layout you edit the configuration in one place and the whole document changes.
Sure, it's a learning curve and you have to remember to run the LaTeX interpeter to actually get a document but the effort saved in other places more than makes up for the hassle.
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Agreed, LyX will change the way you think about word processing. I honestly don't know how I managed without it.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Much confidence is inspired by a website that does not work with Firefox, and wants to harvest your email address to allow you downloading their beta software (well, font).
I really don't understand what all the hate is about for Computer Modern. I think it's a fine font.
Of course, it doesn't look nice on the screen when viewed at 100%. But that's what you get for viewing something at 72 (or 96 or whatever Windows uses) dpi, that's designed to be viewed on paper at 300dpi.
If you blow Computer Modern up to 150% or so, which in my experience tends to be what happens if you fit the width of a document to a good-sized monitor, I think it looks pretty good. But at 10 or 12pt at 100% magnification on a low-resolution device like a computer monitor, you lose all the fine detail that you need.
I guess I can see how there's a need for an alternative for people who are doing all-digital workflows, but if you're going to print the paper out at the end, there's nothing wrong with Computer Modern. It certainly beats the pants off of Times New Roman, IMHO, if you have a good 300+ dpi laser to use as an output device.
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I did this too. In fact it reflects my general experiences with Linux distros and opensource sofware -- you can start with something easy and move on to deeper levels. The system encourages you to figure things out. I'm not saying it doesn't happen with closed software, but for some reason I don't see it in the commercial Windows world at all.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
But to give credit where it's due, Ctrl-K,LeftArrow is quicker than typing /leftarrow and Ctrl-G,e is faster than /epsilon. Now that the new version of MT can import/export TeX formulas, that makes an interesting solution.
When ideas fail, words become very handy.
To me it seems like both projects took ridiculously long to complete and they were delayed over and over and over again. Anyway, for better or for worse now they are both here ... in beta ;)
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Why on earth did the OO team feel the need to invent a whole new command set, rather than just using LaTeX commands? I went through the pain of learning to set math in LaTeX (like a great many scientists). Now I get it and can set almost anything I want without looking up the commands. If I want to use OO, all the commands are different. I could learn the new commands...or return to LaTeX.
;-)
On a positive note, now that I've discovered the Beamer package, I can produce pretty slides complete with equations and don't need Open or MS Office. And LaTeX always looks nicest
For many working scientists, manuscript creation is performed using a monospaced typeface.
I admit that I was initially quite excited when I downloaded these files a few days ago. (Yeah, I lead a sheltered life: a new typeface can excite me.) The excitement evaporated when I realised that there seems to be no monospaced typeface. I might consider using these files for final output -- I'll have to see how it looks in practice; the individual glyphs look quite nice -- but this announcement hardly supports the entire process as their mission statement suggests.
Try Lyx, a GUI for LaTex.
Word 2007 has a completely revamped equation editor and includes a new font specifically designed for laying out math equations (Cambria Math).
If you haven't given it a whirl, you should. Quick, easy, approachable, and it produces beautiful output. You can even cut/paste equations to/from MathML.
Neil
Have fun using TeX on the web. Oh wait, you can't. Well have fun throwing all your semantics away by translating your lightweight TeX into heavyweight bloated PDFs and images.
OpenOffice.org's math editor is just barely OK; the STIX fonts may help somewhat if they're integrated. (But why did they need to invent that awful syntax?) The math editor that comes with MS Office 2007 is much better. See Unicode Technical Note #28 (http://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/) for an explanation of the syntax and an example document created with that system.
I have tried xpdf. It was just good enough to make me go through the hassle of downloading and installing acrobat reader from a tarball. Now that Acrobat Reader is in the major repositories, it's even easier.
The whole UI is confusing and overly spartan. For example, there's no reason the sliders need to be so quirky. I think it's a holdover from when graphical displays were rare, but click-scroll down, ctrl-click (or was it shift-click? I can never get these right) scroll up is a pretty stupid way of handling scroll bars anymore.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
This is my preferred way of typesetting equations for Keynote or Powerpoint presentations, btw. (There are similar methods involving OS X Services, but in my experience LaTeXit works smoother).
Tell me about scientists without an agenda of their own. Religion was and is always used as a means of improving things. Why do you think people know how to read and write? It's only because someone thought it helpful to write down religious scriptures. There's no chance of dividing religion from science. Whatever SIL does, they certainly improved linguistics as well (even if I only happen to use their superior Gentium fonts-which happen to be more suitable for linguistics than Stix). Speaking of linguisics and religion, tell me what Arabic would be w/o religion. Islam created Arabic (at least as we know it). The language people think to speak (colloquial Arabic often called) has not much in common with what Arabic is considered by the Arabs themselves. Highly interesting, religion and language.
BS! Are you troll or otherwise stupid? It is possible to convert TeX-based docs to HTML. For example tex4ht can convert LaTeX to HTML. If there are some mathematical formulas, they can be converted to MathML. It is also common to convert LaTeX to HTML so that all math is converted to pictures.
BTW there is a whole book about using LaTeX on the Web. That really makes your statement "Have fun using TeX on the web. Oh wait, you can't." extremely ridiculous. That book is "The LaTeX Web Companion: Integrating TeX, HTML, and XML" by Michel Goossens, Sebastian Rahtz, Eitan M. Gurari, Ross Moore, and Robert S. Sutor.
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen - http://iki.fi/juhtolv
I hate fonts that allow O and 0, and 1 and l to look so similar. This has only been a major headache in the computing world for a few decades, no need to change now. I don't care if they are experts, it is stupid and short sighted to continue this mistake. Before you say anything, I do use a font that sensibly corrects this error.
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My first point was that TeX is not directly suitable for describing mathematical formulas on the web, and it's not. I don't know of any browsers that support TeX. I wasn't trying to imply that TeX isn't appropriate for describing documents that will eventually be displayed on the web.
My second point was that currently the best option is converting to PDFs and images, which sucks. The post I replied to said this font wasn't needed because we already had TeX, but on the web TeX isn't supported and we have MathML instead, so a freely available font like this is needed to help MathML succeed. (Trying to view some MathML in Firefox pops up a dialog telling the user to go download MathML fonts. That's not going to help MathML catch on very quickly.)
Admittedly, I wasn't very clear.
Of course, there are better fonts for screen, for example Bitstream Charter and its enhanced version called Charis SIL and Bitstream Vera -fontfamily and its enhanced version called DejaVu Fonts. But even Times and its clones are much better for screen than fonts of Computer Modern family. Computer Modern is so light that reading it from screen is like raping my eyes, especially when using low-resolution screen. *PUKE* |-O~
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen - http://iki.fi/juhtolv
"My first point was that TeX is not directly suitable for describing mathematical formulas on the web, and it's not. I don't know of any browsers that support TeX."
http://www.integretechpub.com/techexplorer/
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen - http://iki.fi/juhtolv