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

[juhtolv]

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 .

Re:Equation Editor/Matlab

[be-fan]

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!

Re:Licensing is a critical part of the software.

[juhtolv]

According to people in debian-legal -mailinglist that latest license is not yet free enough. Also, IIRC those fonts can not be included to TeX Live, because license is not yet free enough. Problem is this: Not every kind of modification is allowed. You can remove or add glyphs and modify them, but there are also other things that can be done to fonts, for example modifying kerning.

http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/11/threads.html

Re:Equation Editor/Matlab

[megaditto]

The idea of learning a several thousand large charracter set with all the associated keyboard shortcuts holds no interest for me Pretty soon China will become the only Superpower, and then you are screwed.

mathml

[bcrowell]

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.