Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Stix Scientific Fonts Reach Beta Release

Posted by Zonk on Sat Nov 03, 2007 06:33 PM
from the make-sure-to-!-after-the-word-science dept.
Software Science Technology
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."
+ -
story

Related Stories

[+] Developers: Free STIX Fonts to be Released in September 27 comments
tbspit writes "The STIX fonts project has announced that version 1.0 of the STIX fonts should be released in September 2005. The comprehensive font set is to include mathematical symbols and alphabets, and is intended to serve the scientific and engineering community for electronic and print publication. The STIX fonts should be available as fully hinted Type 1 and True Type fonts. The STIX project will also create a TeX implementation. Progress towards release can be monitored here."
Submission: Stix Scientific Fonts Reach Beta Release by starseeker (141897)
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Stix Scientific Fonts Reach Beta Release 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • arg (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 03 2007, @06:36PM (#21227291)
    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?
    • 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.

      • Re:Licensing is a critical part of the software. (Score:5, Informative)

        by juhtolv (2181) on Saturday November 03 2007, @07:52PM (#21227767) Homepage
        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 [debian.org]

        • Re:Licensing is a critical part of the software. (Score:4, Informative)

          by zeromorph (1009305) on Saturday November 03 2007, @09:05PM (#21228095)

          Why are they doing this? There's a nice FLOSS license for fonts: the OFL [sil.org].

          As a linguist I do not like the SIL as a institution, but their fonts and the license under which the fonts are distributed are without any doubt great.

          • Sorry for the off-topic, but out of curiosity, what is it that you don't like about SIL as an institution? I know very little about them outside of the information on their site and given their growing notability in the font arena I would like to gather a little more info.

            • Re:Licensing is a critical part of the software. (Score:5, Informative)

              by zeromorph (1009305) on Sunday November 04 2007, @04:57AM (#21230071)

              They discredited linguistics as a science in many countries of Asia, Africa and South America - especially through their missionary work and their connections to US governmental agencies (e.g. CIA) and US corporations. That's not the SIL alone, but they are the biggest and most powerful organization of that kind. And, they actually carry linguistics in their name. You can't work as a linguist in many countries without being permanently considered as a missionary or worse.

              Because of their religious and political activity they were thrown out of several Latin American states where they acted much more aggressively than in Africa and Asia. (There are several books on that subject, but I can't tell which is actually good. The SIL says - of course - none.)

              To sum it up, they use science as a cover for their religious-political agenda - as a scientist that makes me very angry.

              But to be fair, their fonts [sil.org] (and XeTeX [sil.org] for that matter) are great stuff and a lot of people associated with them do respectable, even tremendous, work.

  • Can't find anything useful on the website (without giving e-mail address), here's why: <a class="starter" accesskey="5" title="STIX Beta Test" href="#">STIX Beta Test</a>

  • Really all that new? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gardyloo (512791) on Saturday November 03 2007, @07:14PM (#21227523)
    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 [wolfram.com].
          Basically: what's new about the Stix font set?

  • math typography (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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 differen

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by juhtolv (2181)
      STIX Fonts have both text fonts and math fonts. Therefore you do not need to care, how they look like with other serif fonts used for body, because STIX Fonts can handle that body text, too. On the other hand, STIX Fonts are made to look like Times. Therefore, any sans serif and monospace font that looks good with Times should look good with STIX Fonts.
  • The user license is a little hard to interpret for those of us who don't speak legalese. Can someone help with the following bit:

    2. The following copyright and trademark notice and these Terms and Conditions shall be included in all copies of one or more of the Font typefaces and any derivative work created as permitted under this License: ...
    Does this apply to simply using the fonts in a document?

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by coyote4til7 (189857)
      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.

  • mathml (Score:5, Informative)

    by bcrowell (177657) on Saturday November 03 2007, @08:17PM (#21227905) Homepage

    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.

          • I think you have to keep in mind that MathML is intended to be a more general mark-up than what you get in TeX or your typical word processor's equation editor. For example, the &InvisibleTimes; entity in MathML means the presentation is unambiguous and can be parsed in different ways, perhaps even spoken by a screen reader, and has no equivalent in the other notations under discussion here. MathML is verbose, and certainly not friendly to human writers, but it was never intended to be a replacement for

  • They will have a big job replacing the computer modern fonts, especially if they don't make convenient LaTeX packeges to load the fonts.

    • 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 l

  • Small font sizes (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ortholattice (175065) on Saturday November 03 2007, @08:50PM (#21228029)
    I took a quick look at the Stix fonts - only a few samples, so maybe I'm overlooking something - but they seem to have the same problem that plagues almost all recently designed fonts, free and otherwise: they don't render clean bitmaps at small sizes, when ClearType or other font smoothing is turned off. To me, smoothing often just doesn't work all that well for small point sizes. Sometimes it makes very small fonts nearly illegible that are easily readable in bitmap form (e.g. Mono Andale at 8pt where it is essentially impossible to distinguish a period and a comma with smoothing turned on).

    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.

      • Windows is a bit funny when it comes to font smoothing. The standard option has a font size floor, below which nothing is smoothed. IMHO, this is actually rather large. ClearType seems to try to smooth everything regardless, which leads to the bizarre situation that I actually prefer to have ClearType on even on a CRT, because text at moderate sizes looks much better antialiased even if the subpixel effects sometimes cause artifacts because they were designed for TFT screens.

  • Some of the fonts apparently crash FontBook when previewed. It's too bad, since I was hoping for a good symbol font.

    • Re:awesome (Score:5, Informative)

      by juhtolv (2181) on Saturday November 03 2007, @06:46PM (#21227351) Homepage
      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 .
    • They have a great set for today, but what happens when new symbols are needed? Is there a clear version path so that future updates are backwards-compatible, and it's clear who has which version? I'd hate to send a manuscript to the printer only to find out that I had version 2.0 and they had version 3.0.

      they needed a font set that had all the symbols you'd ever want to type in science

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by juhtolv (2181)
        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.
    • ILuvRamen says:

      Well good, they needed a font set that had all the symbols you'd ever want to type in science. Only one little problem though...how do you type it? You'd either need a seriously huge keyboard, someone to memorize thousands of key combinations on a current keyboard, or an on screen keyboard program.

      Summary says:

      Among other uses, it has long been hoped that this would make the wide scale use of MathML in browsers possible.

      Ramen, meet Summary. Summary, meet Ramen. MathML FTW, natch.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Enderandrew (866215)
          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.

        • Re:awesome (Score:5, Insightful)

          by ScriptedReplay (908196) on Saturday November 03 2007, @07:53PM (#21227779)
          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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Whatsisname (891214)
      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 equatio
      • 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?
      • To be fair Mathtype has plenty of keyboard shortcuts as well. However, LaTeX's macros are just so much more convenient when there are a lot of font changes and notations I have not decided on. Besides, the looks of papers written with Word/Mathtype just doesn't look quite "right" to me, even though I guess I have a pretty good grasp of Word's advanced features. Maybe this has something to do with Word's inability to insert line breaks inside inline equations and the strange line spacing. Finally, Word s

    • Re:Equation Editor/Matlab (Score:5, Informative)

      by be-fan (61476) on Saturday November 03 2007, @07:34PM (#21227659)
      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: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Ig0r (154739)
        LyX is a nice frontend program that simplifies LaTeX input

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by torako (532270)
        I love LaTeXit on the Mac. It's so tightly integrated in the Mac way of doing things that people don't even notice they're using LaTeX (well, apart from the syntax ;). It features a small windows where you can enter snippets of LaTeX which it will compile and display. You can then drag and drop the image to basically any program where it will appear as a PDF, with transparent background and all.

        This is my preferred way of typesetting equations for Keynote or Powerpoint presentations, btw. (There are simil

    • Re:Equation Editor/Matlab (Score:5, Funny)

      by megaditto (982598) on Saturday November 03 2007, @07:57PM (#21227801)

      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.
      • They don't memorize any shortcuts, they just write down the pronunciation (either in Pinyin/romanization in the RPC or in Bopomofo in Taiwan) and then choose from the possible homophones, usually helped with a predictive system. It's similar in Japan as well.
    • Not to mention Latex. It takes me like ten times as much time to edit equation in MS Word or OO.org. Of course mathematica exports to AMS-LaTeX.

        • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

          by juhtolv (2181)
          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.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by zippthorne (748122)

            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.
            emph. mine.

            Now that is ironic. Although I disagree that Times is a better font for screen reading. It's all squishdy and pointy.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.