STIX Project Releases v1.0 of Its Scientific Fonts Set 100
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)."
How to use them properly? (Score:4, Interesting)
Finally. But how to use them properly with webbrowsers? For Firefox I had to use
math { font-family: STIXGeneral, STIXVariants, STIXIntegralsSm, STIXIntegralsD, STIXIntegralsUp, STIXIntegralsUpSm, STIXIntegralsUpD, STIXSizeOneSym, STIXSizeTwoSym, STIXSizeThreeSym, STIXSizeFourSym, STIXSizeFiveSym, STIXNonUnicode; }
in my userContent.css to get partial math glyphs from installed STIXfonts. To get every MathML char rendered with STIXfonts I had to disable custom fonts for webpages and set all fonts to STIXGeneral. Unfortunately STIXGeneral seems to be only available with serif. Which isn't all that good for reading text from displays.
TeX? (Score:3, Interesting)
Why can't we just make basic latex commands part of html? There are some pretty lightweight tex compilers out there which, in a perfect world, should have been shipping standard on new computers for ages now.
There is a much bigger problem than "0" and "O"! (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:There is a much bigger problem than "0" and "O" (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree that font outlines are not copyrightable (although font programs are) and that fonts can be traced without infringement. It is easy for the font to leave the control of the copyright holder, although perhaps without any hinting that is embedded in the font.
But in this case, the entire intent of the SIL license is that the fonts do not appear in one of those "10,000 Fonts!" packages sold by folks who only aggregate them and do none of the work. And that intent will be thwarted.