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STIX Project Releases v1.0 of Its Scientific Fonts Set
starseeker writes "The Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) font creation project has released version 1.0 of its font set. This release is the product of almost 15 years of work, with the goal of creating a comprehensive set of fonts for scientific and engineering manuscript creation. The fonts have been released under the SIL Open Font License, and can be downloaded here. Among the many potential applications is proper universal support for MathML in web browsers." If you want a peek, here's "a page for viewing the thousands of glyphs (as a first approximation, think of a glyph as an individual character)."
Surely by now there must be some crucial symbol missing, what is it?
Really? Wow. My great, great, great, great^n grandparents told me about them. They said that the final fonts were coming "real soon now". :-)
I can't mod you up but +++++
Because Arial doesn't have the -right- oddball glyphs.
"The largest component of the fonts is devoted to the thousands of mathematical operators and technical symbols necessary to report research."
The biggest problem with 'modern' fonts I can see is that so few have proper differentiation between O and 0. It's an ugly thing, particularly when it's a problem we solved decades ago and should have stayed solved. Yet somehow it doesnt.
Is downloading this package going to help with that problem? MathML is nice but I dont actually need it. 0s that actually look like 0s would make me very happy though.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
call me spoiled, but if you announce a link for a "peek", i expect something other than a website that prompts me to install the fonts i wanted a peek at.
How about something useful, like comparisions with existing fonts to show what the big deal about these new ones is. Preferably in a way that doesnt require having them installed.
Hell, how about making that stupid 100 screen long page a PDF with the font embeded?
HI O WISE PRINCE. WHT TOOK U SO DAM LONG?
15 years? Sounds like Stix has too much time on their hands.
load "$",8,1
I guess it's just an indication at how slow the science to product lag is.
br/
I can mod you, but you are not worth it. So -----
None. But then, if you are writing real math papers, you already would have learned to stay away from MS Word & Arial Unicode.
Since Arial is not open, it can't be (for example) shipped with a TeX distribution.
Why did you even comment on this story, anyway?
Finally. But how to use them properly with webbrowsers? For Firefox I had to use
math { font-family: STIXGeneral, STIXVariants, STIXIntegralsSm, STIXIntegralsD, STIXIntegralsUp, STIXIntegralsUpSm, STIXIntegralsUpD, STIXSizeOneSym, STIXSizeTwoSym, STIXSizeThreeSym, STIXSizeFourSym, STIXSizeFiveSym, STIXNonUnicode; }
in my userContent.css to get partial math glyphs from installed STIXfonts. To get every MathML char rendered with STIXfonts I had to disable custom fonts for webpages and set all fonts to STIXGeneral. Unfortunately STIXGeneral seems to be only available with serif. Which isn't all that good for reading text from displays.
Because of what they've encoded in the Private Use Area block at code point U+E0F2. Check STIXv1.0.0/Glyphs/STIXNonUnit.otf.pdf in the zip file to see it, and check the last link in the summary for the character's name. I hope that gets folded back into the Unicode Standard someday....
The Internet is full. Go away.
Why can't we just make basic latex commands part of html? There are some pretty lightweight tex compilers out there which, in a perfect world, should have been shipping standard on new computers for ages now.
Looks familiar, I could swear I've seen that before :-)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Einstein_tongue.jpg
I've looked at these fonts, and they look very good. Is there a LaTeX package that will let me use these fonts with LaTeX yet? I think they look much more attractive than the Computer Modern fonts that ship with LaTeX.
If I can be modded down for being a troll, can I be modded up for being an orc, or a balrog?
I really like it when book or publication authors take the time to use good fonts and make the equations readable. There's nothing that turns me off more when reading a paper and the author has done all the equations in Times with crappy-looking subscripts and superscripts.
Uh-oh. Nobody told those publishers that the SIL license was not written by a lawyer and never had any legal review. OSI, unfortunately, will approve a license that hasn't been crafted by a lawyer, and this can be a big problem for the users of that license, when the license acts radically differently in court than they expect it to.
The problem in this case is that the license allows conversion of the font to any other license or public domain once it is embedded in a document. The license explicitly says that it no longer applies once the font's embedded. And the authors didn't realize that if you extract the font from the document, the license doesn't come back!
I left a note on their web submission form.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
To see what it was like to use these fonts on the web, I created a test page. This uses dynamically downloaded fonts, which work in most current web browsers. (Firefox users need Firefox 3.6 or later.)
This sample is sized at 16 point. Smaller than that, many of the symbols are unreadable. That's something to be careful about. When you have a huge symbol set, the symbols need to be bigger. However, some of the symbols don't scale up well. If you scale up that page, the integral symbols look great, but the arrows become pixilated. Some of the symbols seem to have been were badly encoded.
This is just a raw demonstration of the font; for formulas, you'd use MathML. I'm not sure if MathML, the W3C names for math characters in HTML, and the STIX fonts are all synchronized yet. But at least you don't have to tell people "to display this page, install all these fonts first."
The problem in this case is that the license allows conversion of the font to any other license or public domain once it is embedded in a document. The license explicitly says that it no longer applies once the font's embedded. And the authors didn't realize that if you extract the font from the document, the license doesn't come back!
I thought that was a feature.
Fonts are very funny in that they're a form of art that is meant to be used by people to create more art. It starts off as the typographer's amazing work of art... but once it's on the page, it's no longer just the typographer's work of art: it's part of another work of art. And no one pays attention to the poor typographer after that point... apart of typography geeks, of course.
Aside of the fact that you can recover the original font data easily through embedding and you don't need to trace outlines or anything, how is embedding any different from actual use of the font in typesetting?
Wouldn't it be awesome if there was a license that only covered the distribution of font files, but that would also guarantee the users that the fonts can be used for any purpose and if you're just an user of the font, you don't have to worry about legal aspects... the kind of a basic freedom the open source licenses are supposed to guarantee, right?
I agree that font outlines are not copyrightable (although font programs are) and that fonts can be traced without infringement. It is easy for the font to leave the control of the copyright holder, although perhaps without any hinting that is embedded in the font.
But in this case, the entire intent of the SIL license is that the fonts do not appear in one of those "10,000 Fonts!" packages sold by folks who only aggregate them and do none of the work. And that intent will be thwarted.
Bruce Perens.
I find your interpretation of the license quite strange (but, well, I am not a lawyer). The license only says that the license "does not apply to any document created using the Font Software", not that the license does not apply *at all* once the font is embedded. If you extract a font out of the document, I suppose you obtain a copy of the original font, or at least a modified version of the original font, and the license does explicitly cover copies and modified versions. I would expect this holds for any copy or modified version, no matter by which process they were obtained.
I think that for free font licenses allowing the fonts to be embedded without posing restrictions on the license of the document is of paramount importance. Do you know any other font license that allows this form of embedding and is for sure lawyer-proof?
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
A little clarification, it's not the license that does not apply to documents created with the font, but the requirement that the font can only be distributed under the same license. Here is the precise text about this exception:
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
The problem is simply that they didn't know the right words. They could have given permission to distribute a document without restriction when the fonts are embedded in it, and everything would have been OK. But they didn't give that permission, they said, and I quote: The requirement for fonts to remain under this license does not apply to any document created using the Font Software. They didn't consider that if the font is no longer under the license, none of the license terms apply any longer. They don't suddenly come back if you extract the font from the document. They also said that if you violate the license, it's null and void . What they meant to say was that the license terminates, but again they didn't know the right words. If a license is "null and void", does that mean "all rights reserved" or does it mean "no rules, do what you want"? You might have to go to court to determine what it means, and bankrupt some poor Open Source developer in the process, just because you picked the wrong words.
We have a case of one developer, Bob Jacobsen, and his project JMRI, who were pretty seriously screwed by the fact that he chose Artistic License 1.0 and a lower-court judge was convinced that it meant "public domain". A lot of people, including me, spent a lot of time and effort taking that to appeal. Fortunately we won, but it took years, and Bob lost about a year's income in the process and was not fully compensated in the settlement. Larry Wall wrote that license before there were any lawyers who would help Open Source developers, but now we have ones who work for free and there is no excuse to craft a license without one.
Bruce Perens.
What if I want to distribute a document containing the embedded fonts while imposing some restrictions on the document itself? Would I be able to do that if you only give me permissions to distribute the document without restriction? But maybe I'm mixing up without restriction and without restrictions :)
In the end, you are right, this is indeed a perfect example why it should be the lawyers who do the wording of licenses.
If you don't fail at least 90 percent of the time, you're not aiming high enough. (Alan Kay)
That's a good question, and the answer would be that the attorney crafting the license would take more time thinking about it than I take to write the typical shashdot comment :-) Making this license work correctly would be within the competence of any lawyer.
Essentially all of my consulting work these days is with attorneys and their customers, and is regarding Open Source in some way, and thus I am getting to see a lot of how things go wrong with Open Source and the law. And the one lesson I've learned is that it is always tremendously less expensive to fix the problem early. That they missed the opportunity to do so is a shame.
Bruce Perens.
If I named functions and variables the way scientists and mathematicians seem to be so keen on, I'd be fired. every last one of them is a single character name. Why is this allowed to go on!?
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
> I agree that font outlines are not copyrightable
Maybe not in the US, but they are elsewhere. It remains to be seen for how long the US will be able to effectively retain this position. It managed to avoid conceding it for WIPO, but the issue isn't going to go away. It has created problems for US corporations distributing PDFs abroad with embedded fonts and discovering that the font was only legal in the US (because it was an unauthorised clone of an existing font).
The ability to eschew the usage of comic sans