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)."

Comments

Re:Why I am supposed to care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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."

Fonts

[Arker]

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.

What a peek

[imsabbel]

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?

Slow news day...

[fishthegeek]

15 years? Sounds like Stix has too much time on their hands.

Re:Slow news day...

[starseeker]

Despite the (simultaneously amusing and frustrating) schedule slippage that the STIX project became infamous for, they deserve tremendous praise for the work they have done here. They have created a monumental work, stuck with the project for well over a decade despite all the setbacks, and released the results free to the world as an open source font. To understand the magnitude of this task, consider how long it would take to design a good quality font for just the standard character set (which isn't easy, as witnessed by the large number of bad fontsets floating around...). Now, scale that up to 8,000+ characters. Not only that, but many of these characters are obscure to any outside of specific scientific fields, and hence the font designers won't immediately know how the characters are supposed to look - the background research must be done, the results organized into some coherent framework, and a LOT of characters have to be created more or less from scratch. This work was being funded by scientific publishing houses who wanted a font for high quality consistent output, so the goal wasn't met by "partial" success - it had to be judged a finished work before any benefit could be realized. They couldn't use the TeX approach of allowing the user to custom-roll their own solution to strange characters - everything had to be handled "up-front" and built into the font.

That is an ENORMOUS task, and the result is a VERY significant contribution to the open source world. I have nothing but admiration and gratitude for the people behind this who persevered and succeeded, not just technically and organizationally but also in working through the legal questions raised by the open source community when selecting an open font license. The publishing houses could have decided that "done and usable in journal paper printing" was "good enough", but the project elected to listen to and work with the community to arrive at the OFL, which is a little odd but apparently workable both for the companies involved and the open source community. So, to those who worked on this project: Thanks!

Re:Why I am supposed to care?

[Anonymous Coward]

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?

Re:LaTeX package?

[iris-n]

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.

There is a much bigger problem than "0" and "O"!

[Bruce Perens]

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