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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)."
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."
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.
I agree. However, if you download the font, in the archive you'll find a directory "Glyphs" that has a bunch of PDFs with tables of the characters shown. Therefore you don't actually have to install the font to take a look at it.
They should have made it easier to find these PDFs....
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?
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.
If what you want is to embed tex in html, you can do it: http://asciimathml.sourceforge.net/ But that doesn't do anything about solving the font problem. You need the fonts, otherwise it can't be rendered. Knuth's Computer Modern fonts were an impressive achievement, but they date back to 1992, and the technology they're built on is obsolete and doesn't fit well with the modern operating systems, or with modern encodings such as unicode. Knuth invented scalable fonts before Adobe reimplemented and commercialized them.
Find free books.
Not yet. Per the website, this set is 1.0; modifications to work with MS Ofice are targeted for 1.1 (expected release this year), and LaTeX with 1.2 (expected release next year).
No but yes. What you need to use them now is XeTeX, a TeX engine that lets you use OpenType fonts in your TeX documents.
LaTeX per se uses only Type 1 (actually a few more) fonts, and these aren't ready yet.
entropy happens
TeX4ht renders TeX as HTML.
MathTeX is a CGI that renders TeX embedded in a webpage as an image.
The Techexplorer plugin, originally by IBM, will directly render TeX embedded in HTML.
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."