Thank, Joel. Very interesting. I will be fiddling with it.<br>Best wishes,<br clear="all">Nicolas<br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 1:12 PM, Joel C. Salomon <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:joelcsalomon@gmail.com">joelcsalomon@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
Nicolas Vaughan wrote:<br>
> I haven't been able to find information on the unicode-math package.<br>
> What's it for exactly?<br>
<br>
Recent versions of Unicode (since 4.0, IIRC) include in Plane 1 special<br>
mathematical alphabets; see <<a href="http://tinyurl.com/unicode-math-alpha" target="_blank">http://tinyurl.com/unicode-math-alpha</a>>.<br>
Some fonts include all these characters, along with special kerning<br>
tables designed for mathematical use. The unicode-math package allows<br>
these fonts to be used with XɘTeX, negating the need for special metrics<br>
files &c. The package is still in an early pre-release stage, and Will<br>
is too busy to give it much time now, but it’s already pretty usable.<br>
<br>
At present time, however, there are exactly *two* fonts that implement<br>
the Unicode Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols along with the necessary<br>
OpenType tables: Microsoft’s Cambria Math (available with Office 2007)<br>
and Apostolos Syropoulos’s Asana Math (on CTAN).<br>
<br>
There are also several in-progress fonts. Ross Mills of Tiro Typeworks<br>
(who did most of the maths work for Cambria Math) is working on a font<br>
he calls Maxwell; see <<a href="http://tiro.com/fonts.html" target="_blank">http://tiro.com/fonts.html</a>>. Johannes Küster of<br>
typoma GmbH is working on Minion Math, a companion to Adobe’s Minion Pro<br>
(Minion name used under license), Latin Modern Math and (along with<br>
Hermann Zapf) a revision of Euler; see <<a href="http://typoma.com/en/fonts.html" target="_blank">http://typoma.com/en/fonts.html</a>><br>
and <<a href="http://typoma.com/en/projects.html" target="_blank">http://typoma.com/en/projects.html</a>>. Finally, the STIX Fonts<br>
Project has been working on a Times-like maths set for a while; expect<br>
them to be done any decade now, with the OpenType tables set to follow<br>
not much more than a century later.<br>
<br>
The development version of unicode-math can be downloaded from<br>
<<a href="http://github.com/wspr/unicode-math/tree/master" target="_blank">http://github.com/wspr/unicode-math/tree/master</a>>; put unicode-math.sty,<br>
unicode-math.tex, and unicode-math-add.tex somewhere XɘLaTeX can find<br>
them, and experiment.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
—Joel Salomon<br>
</font></blockquote></div><br>