New Royalty-Free Fonts for Scientific Writing/Publishing 33
stotterj writes: "Writing anything up in science almost always means changing fonts a lot to use all the characters necessary for formulas and units (times, symbol, arial). This is annoying. People at STIX Fonts are putting together a universal font set that already has the special characters built in and can be used from writing to publishing. The fonts that result from the project will be made available for free." The site says that "In particular. the STIX project will create a TeX implementation that TeX users can install and configure with minimal effort." The licensing for these fonts (discussed in the FAQ) will allow free use, but not modification.
Re:Distortion (Score:1, Informative)
If it's a web page, and you're using IE, you'll be prompted if you want to d/l the font.
And if it's slashdot, well, the <font> tag isn't allowed, and unicode is stripped.
Re:Is something wrong with TeX? (Score:2, Informative)
TeX contains most math symbols, but is missing a lot of scientific symbols, and some people want to write their scientific paper in MS Word.
Yes, there is. (Score:4, Informative)
For example, there are lots and lots of LaTeX papers out there in PDF format that were created with dvips and pstopdf, and the results are just awful. Papers with embedded TeX fonts are also very large.
In fact, many people nowadays just use PDFTeX, and it would be good to have fonts that go with that natively.
Now, you could convert TeX fonts to PostScript or TrueType. But typographically, they are not really all that nice.
computer modern, and missing characters (Score:4, Informative)
We would happily use TeX for everything, except for two fundamental problems, and a few more superficial ones. First the fundamental problems:
- The standard TeX fonts are Computer Modern (Knuth's invention) - these are lighter and "looser" than the standard text typefaces (Adobe Times Roman in particular), and text becomes uglier and slightly harder to read when the two types of fonts are used together in the same document.
- The standard Tex fonts are also missing a lot of special symbols that scientific publishers have, over the years, had to create for themselves. It's impossible to capture every special character that a mathematician or physicist may decide to invent for some particular purpose, but we've managed to include in the description of the font, and in the latest Unicode version (3.2) essentially all the special characters we could find that have received repeated use in scientific communications. If more appear later we'll get them added to the font. The idea is to be comprehensive.
The more superficial problems are, first that TeX distributions suffer from wild inconsistencies in what particular fonts are available - early experiences with making font-less PDF files (or even DVI files) that relied on users having a TeX font distribution available to them for display were essentially total failures. And second, TeX is unfortunately not all that widely used even by scientists and engineers... Another side problem is the way TeX is limited to a small number of 256-character font files (with further restrictions on tfm files) - what we're planning is to have all 8000 or so glyphs available in 4 OpenType fonts (regular, bold, italic, bold italic) - of course to use with TeX it will have to be broken out into a few dozen 256-character Type-1 font files.The goal here is to be able to distribute scientific content in XML format, with the mathematical content marked up in a standard way such as MathML, and special characters treated properly as entities within Unicode, and then have essentially any conforming application (web browsers, Star Office, MSWord one hopes...) display the content correctly and reliably.