[OS X TeX] MathTimes Pro

[Gary L. Gray]

On Dec 13, 2007, at 1:07 PM, Bruno Voisin wrote:

> Le 13 déc. 07 à 17:02, Gary L. Gray a écrit :
>
>> I am using the MathTime Professional 2 fonts (also from PCTeX <http://www.pctex.com/mtpro2.html 
>> >) on a very large project and they are working beautifully.
>
> Hi Gary,
>
> From your experience with MathTime Pro, and from the (absence of)  
> information about the STIX fonts and their TeX support to come, do  
> you think MathTime (Basic, Lite or Pro) will be rendered obsolete by  
> STIX, or does it provide functionality STIX won't have?
>
> I've been wondering that for some time. For years I've been using  
> the MathTime 1.1 fonts purchased from Blue Sky Research in the 90s,  
> and the absence of bold math italic is really limiting. But before  
> investing in MathTime Pro, is this worth the effort, or is it better  
> to wait for STIX which, if provided adequate TeX support, has all  
> chances of becoming a de facto standard?


Hi Bruno.

I was only vaguely aware of the STIX project, so I did a little  
looking around. LaTeX support doesn't appear to be coming any time  
soon, though Will Robertson posted the following to comp.text.tex on  
October 31:

> Depending on how they are releasing the fonts, they should work with a
> new package I've prepared for XeTeX+LaTeX. Still needs finishing up,
> though...I've kind of been waiting for the STIX fonts since the MS-
> only Cambria Math is the only other unicode maths font in existence at
> the moment.

This is, of course, looks promising, but then on November 1, in reply  
to a the query shown, he posted:

> > Are you saying they *don't* have the now-standard OpenType features
> > for maths that Cambria Math uses?
>
> They certainly don't. They're unusable right now in both Microsoft
> Word and XeTeX.


There is much more, but it all can be found in the thread:

<http://groups.google.com.au/group/comp.text.tex/browse_thread/thread/fb51f7c9de931e5f/3b3413869ae4763b 
 >

In any event, I have yet to dive into XeTeX and don't know when I will  
have the time to do so. With that in mind, it doesn't appear that any  
type of dependable TeX support is coming within the next few months,  
so if you want something that works with LaTeX (and it works well),  
then I would definitely spring for the MathTime Professional fonts  
(the academic price for the complete font set is only 99 USD, which is  
becoming a better bargain all the time for those of you in Europe :-) ).

I hope this helps, though I don't know that I told you anything that  
you didn't already know. :-)

All the best,
   Gary