Slashdot Mirror
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."
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?
you get the first post... and you say chicken..?
Stupid. Those fonts are primarily meant for TeX-based applications, for example LaTeX. rarely used characters are written with commands that start with backslash, for example: \ldots .
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen - http://iki.fi/juhtolv
Summary says:
Ramen, meet Summary. Summary, meet Ramen. MathML FTW, natch.
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!
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
It is Unicode-font. Therefore your problem _may_ exist only with those characters that are mapped to Private Use Area. It seems those fonts have some characters that are not yet in Unicode.
Juhapekka "naula" Tolvanen - http://iki.fi/juhtolv
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
Drill down to the Project page: http://www.stixfonts.org/project.html And the American Mathematical Society STIX project page has some examples: http://www.ams.org/STIX/private/stixprv-E2.html
Best Free Utilities for Windows
Times New Roman provides more scientific characters than the average home user will ever need. However, it does not meet he needs of the academic crowd, hence the need for this project. And instead of sprinkling a few characters across many fonts, it makes more sense to have a dedicate font (or fonts) where you know to look specifically for scientific symbols.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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?
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
And so the age old mind puzzle is put to rest.
chicken
Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
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.
Find free books.
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.
LyX is a nice frontend program that simplifies LaTeX input
Soma: because a gramme is better than a damn.
Now that is ironic. Although I disagree that Times is a better font for screen reading. It's all squishdy and pointy.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
Derivative is actually used in the dictionary sense. The document is developed (or derived) from previous (presumably scientific) work. It is expressed with the font. In this case a derivative work would be a font based on this one.
the clock on the wall says 4 til 7
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.)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Even better, check out the The Comprehensive LaTeX Symbol List (PDF file). For a quick and dirty overview of what kinds of symbols aren't in Times New Roman, a large scientific/mathematical subset of these have been converted to screen bitmaps: GIF and PNG Images for Math Symbols.
The other excellent feature of the Computer Modern class is that all three families fit visually together, meaning that typewriter text in the middle of a document fits visually with the body text, whether it is Roman or Sans Serif. The only thing I would like to see is a version with old-style numbers (like one of the Vista fonts has), for use in non-technical documents. I also find the typewriter text attractive, and very easy to read (since it was designed by a computer scientist for code listings, this is not surprising), and even the sans serif family is tolerable.
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).