STIX Fonts Project Completes Design Phase

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A group of scientific publishers today announced the release of the full complement of the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) Fonts in a beta test version.

 

This free, comprehensive set of special characters - mainly mathematical or scientific - represents a significant breakthrough in scientific, technical, and medical publishing. Following a short beta test period, the final production release of the STIX Fonts should occur before the end of 2007.

 

The successful completion of the STIX Fonts project will alleviate the need for publishers to assemble symbols from a variety of fonts. When posted to a Web site, documents using the STIX Fonts will be properly rendered, regardless of the fonts installed on a particular computer, saving editors' valuable time.

 

The six publishers that collaborated to design, fund and manage the STIX project include the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Institute of Physics (AIP), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the American Physical Society (APS), Elsevier, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The beta version can be downloaded from the STIX Fonts web site at STIX Fonts Project Website.

 

The technical development of the STIX Fonts Project was handled by MicroPress, Inc., a respected font designer, which has created and delivered nearly 8,000 characters/glyphs required for these comprehensive fonts. Glyphs designed by Elsevier for an earlier project push the final glyph total to 8,047.

 

"Given the scope of this ambitious undertaking, it's not surprising that completion of the STIX Fonts project took more than 10 years, more than one million dollars in donated staff time, and the combined efforts of a half dozen well-respected scholarly publishers," said Fran Zappulla, Staff Director, IEEE Publishing Operations. "The end result is a font set that is the most comprehensive of its kind, encompassing so many sub-ranges of the Unicode standard and enabling data to be transferred securely through many different systems without corruption."

 

"If you've ever had to assemble scientific symbols from a variety of fonts, many of which vary in character style, positioning, or size, you'll immediately appreciate the benefits of STIX Fonts, said Robert Kelly, Director, Journal Information Systems, the American Physical Society. "Aside from the fact that the STIX Fonts work with a wide variety of web browsers, word processors, and other scholarly communications software, they have the ability to support widely expanded character sets and layout features, which provide richer linguistic support and advanced typographic control. We hope that all operating system and application vendors move quickly to support the Fonts."

 

By making the fonts freely available, the STIX project hopes to encourage the development of widespread applications that make use of these fonts. In particular the STIX project will create a TEX implementation that TEX users can install and configure with minimal effort. TEX is a computer language designed for typesetting, with particular application to mathematics and other technical material. The TEX version of the fonts is being developed by a sub-contractor, and should be available soon after the production version is released.

For more information visit the STIX Fonts web site at STIX Fonts Project Website

 

For the STIX Fonts project:

T.C. Ingoldsby (Chairman)

American Institute of Physics

2 Huntington Quadrangle, Suite 1NO1

Melville, NY 11747-4502

Phone: +1 516 576 2265

Fax: +1 516 576 2327

Email: [email protected]

 

Source: Stix Fonts