Stix Scientific Fonts Reach Beta Release

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."

Really all that new?

[gardyloo]

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?

Licensing is a critical part of the software.

[jbn-o]

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.

How do you get the journals to accept Open Office?

[Latent Heat]

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?

Re:arg

[Zarel]

They don't validate the e-mail address.

They do very basic validation. asdf@asdf generates an error; [e-mail] generates an error; [e-mail] does not. Apparently, the TLD needs to be exactly three characters; any e-mail address at a .info domain (e.g. [e-mail]) will generate an error.

Re:Guess I'm the only one.

[Bee1zebub]

The other excellent feature of the Computer Modern class is that all three families fit visually together, meaning that typewriter text in the middle of a document fits visually with the body text, whether it is Roman or Sans Serif. The only thing I would like to see is a version with old-style numbers (like one of the Vista fonts has), for use in non-technical documents. I also find the typewriter text attractive, and very easy to read (since it was designed by a computer scientist for code listings, this is not surprising), and even the sans serif family is tolerable.