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.  Read more

Word 2007 and the STM Publisher Ecosystem

As the CTO of Nature Publishing Group, I have become involved in a very lively conversation with Microsoft staff about why Word 2007 is not being actively endorsed by STM publishers. It has recently come to Microsoft’s attention (see blogs Murray Sargent and Brian Jones) that Nature ( https://www.nature.com/nature/authors/submissions/template/index.html ), Science ( https://www.sciencemag.org/about/authors/prep/docx.dtl), and many other scholarly publishers do not accept files authored in Word 2007. Both Science and NPG have been in correspondence with Microsoft staff on this important issue. The staff there have been very willing to engage in this conversation. As Inera is one of NPG’s main suppliers of Word macros (eXtyles) and a general expert on Word, I asked Bruce Rosenblum of Inera to enter the discussion. The following was sent to Microsoft on 12 June 2007 by Bruce Rosenblum to explain why this situation exists.  Read more