STIX Fonts Go Beta
October 31, 2007 will forever be remembered as an important day in publishing history. After more than ten years in research and development, the STIX fonts (Scientific and Technical Information Exchange) have finally launched and are freely available in beta! This new web font set properly renders mathematical symbols on any browser alleviating the need for publishers to assemble symbols from a variety of fonts. It includes over 8,000 glyphs.By making the fonts freely available, the STIX project hopes to encourage the development of widespread applications that make use of these fonts. The TeX version of the fonts should be available soon after the production version is released.
Much thanks goes to the six publishers who collaborated to design, fund, and manage the STIX project include American Chemical Society (ACS), American Institute of Physics (AIP), American Mathematical Society (AMS), American Physical Society (APS), Elsevier, and Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and their technical partner MicroPress, Inc.
Congratulations to Tim Ingoldsby (Project Chairman) and his terrific team for seeing this through.
I recommend all publishers download the fonts from the STIX web site at www.stixfonts.org today.
Comments
The discussion over at SlashDot is interesting:
http://science.slashdot.org/science/07/11/03/1740245.shtml
It was already noted that the attempt to Open License the fonts do not completely work out; at least, it seems that Debian/Ubuntu will not be able to package the fonts, because the license is too restrictive in the type of changes that can be made:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2007/11/msg00000.html
The DFSG is the one of the best set of guidelines of what is really open source. It seems to me that the license designers have been afraid of possible forking :(
Posted by: Egon Willighagen | November 4, 2007 06:42 AM
The issues with the Debian/Ubuntu license have been resolved. In our haste to get the beta STIX Fonts released, we accidentally posted a previous version of the STIX Fonts License. The final version, now posted on the STIX Fonts web site, is acceptable to DFSG. See: http://www.stixfonts.org/feedback-license.html
For the STIX Fonts Project,
Tim Ingoldsby, Project Director
Posted by: Tim Ingoldsby | November 21, 2007 10:25 AM
Tim, cheers! Very good news!
Posted by: Egon Willighagen | November 22, 2007 06:42 AM