[math-font-discuss] what is the status of new math font encodings (mathfont-0.59a)?

[Will Robertson]

Wow Ulrik.
Thanks for this exposition.
It should go on the mfg website.
Karl, would you like to do that?

Now that you mention it ... I didn't want to announce anything yet,  
but ...

On 21/05/2007, at 4:24 , Ulrik Vieth wrote:
> Maybe the long expected release of STIX fonts (if it ever happens)  
> could
> trigger new results, such as bringing Unicode math to XeTeX shortly.

... I've recently been working on a unicode math package for XeTeX,  
and it's almost ready to be looked at by other people's eyes.

Pre-release code can be found here: (just check out unicode-math.pdf)
   <http://scripts.sil.org/svn-public/xetex/TRUNK/texmf/source/ 
xelatex/unicode-math/>
and discussion on the subject here:
   <http://groups.google.com/group/unimath>
Note that the status of the project is highly preliminary and subject  
to radical change in the future. Things have been dormant for a  
couple of months while I've been busy.

The short of it is that Microsoft has implemented impressive math  
font support into Word 2007 by extending OpenType to support the  
various you need. This allowed Jonathan Kew, very generously, to  
implement support for this new standard in XeTeX.

Thanks to Barbara Beeton's work at STIX, we have an enormous mapping  
between mathematical unicode glyphs and TeX command sequences. Based  
on this, I've been playing around with an interface for unicode maths  
in LaTeX. Currently, the only font that can really be used seriously  
for this purpose is Microsoft's Cambria Math, but tools to create new  
fonts will be incorporated into FontForge in due time (as I  
understand it).

Hope this helps,
Will Robertson