Wednesday 7 November 2007

Stix fonts: Initial comments

After a wait of many years the STIX fonts have finally been released as public beta! These offer the promise of much better, more portable support for scientific documents on the web and elsewhere. The STIX fonts provide a uniform set of fonts that provide the glyphs for almost all the mathematical characters that have been added to unicode in recent years.

Initial testing suggests there may still be some problems with plane 1 characters (I just submitted the following comment to the stix beta test comment form...

I tested browser support (windows XP: Firefox, IE 7, Opera) with similar results in all three browsers. The quadruple integral displayed in all three browsers. The plane 1 alphabetic character did not display at all, FF displays 2 missing glyph boxes, IE shows 1 missing glyph box, and opera just shows white space..

I am not able to tell at this stage whether this is user error (I have not specified a sufficiently large set of the STIX fonts in CSS ?) or if this is due to lack of plane 1 support in the browsers, or if there is a problem with the unicode tables in the stix fonts, so I supply the small test file below, which I expect to render as as

QUADRUPLE INTEGRAL OPERATOR

MATHEMATICAL BOLD CAPITAL A

<html>
<head>
<title>stix</title>
<style>
p {
font-family: STIXGeneral, STIXGeneral-Italic, STIXGeneral-Bold, STIXGeneral-BoldItalic;
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<p>x2a0c &#x2a0c;</p>
<p>x1d400 &#x1d400;</p>
</body>
</html>

5 comments:

Unknown said...

I can see a beautiful A in Firefox 2.0.0.8 under Linux.
Blank in Opera.

Anonymous said...

I'm certainly delighted that the STIX beta fonts has come out. It represents a lot of work and we must hope the finally accepted forms come out soon too. The worlds of the Web and TeX can both certainly use the STIX fonts.

I can comment that David's test page shows the quadruple integral in all of Safari 2.0.9, Firefox 1.5.0.9 and Opera 9.2 under Mac OS 10.4.10 after just throwing the OTF files from the unzipped distribution into /Library/Fonts. The Plane-1 character A shows in Firefox, is blank in Safari and displays a box in Opera (which seems to report my OS as 10.4.9 in opera:about). A very nice beginning.

Anonymous said...

Corrections: Opera 9.02, Safari 2.0.4; sorry for the typos!

Anonymous said...

Both render on Ubuntu 7.04 and firefox 2.0.0.8

David Carlisle said...

This test file has made it to the STIX beta site ...


http://www.stixfonts.org/software_app_rsps.html