[XeTeX] XITS Math font - first beata

[George N. White III]

On Sat, Jun 5, 2010 at 3:27 PM, Will Robertson <wspr81 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 2010-06-06 02:54:13 +0930, Taco Hoekwater <taco at elvenkind.com> said:
>
>> Will Robertson wrote:
>>>
>>> On 2010-06-06 01:28:46 +0930, Eelis van der Weegen <eelis at eelis.net>
>>> said:
>>>
>>>> If so, to what extent would this make XITS obsolete?
>>>
>>> Depends how good a job they do :)
>>
>> And whether the current STIX release schedule is reliable. Judging
>> from past results, it is altogether possible that v1.1 won't be
>> ready for release for half a decade yet.
>
>
> I'm a little sensitive to calling people out on missed deadlines... anyway,
> if this ends up being true then they may as well commission Khaled to do the
> job for them :)

STIX is a very ambitious project for a group (scientific and technical
publishers), some who have suffered financially since the project started.
I think the technical work is a very minor portion of the overall effort (e.g.,
getting the Unicode Technical Committee to accept the submissions),
reconciling STIX with both legacy math fonts (as used in typesetters)
and MS Office and Cambria Math.

<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/murrays/archive/2007/11/06/stix-beta-fonts.aspx> and
<http://blogs.msdn.com/b/murrays/archive/2010/01/12/special-capabilities-of-a-math-font.aspx>
gives some insight into the difficulties in making the fonts useful with
MS Office.

The fact that the fonts are available now under an open license means the
TeX community will benefit even if STIX continues to miss deadlines.  The
real losers are the people who are still trying to do maths using the Symbol
font.

-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia