The STIX Fonts project or Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX), is a project sponsored by several leading scientific and technical publishers to provide, under
royalty-free
Royalty-free (RF) material subject to copyright or other intellectual property rights may be used without the need to pay royalties or license fees for each use, per each copy or volume sold or some time period of use or sales.
Computer standard ...
license, a comprehensive font set of mathematical symbols and alphabets, intended to serve the scientific and engineering community for electronic and print publication. The STIX fonts are available as fully
hinted OpenType
OpenType is a format for scalable computer fonts. It was built on its predecessor TrueType, retaining TrueType's basic structure and adding many intricate data structures for prescribing typographic behavior. OpenType is a registered trademark o ...
/
CFF fonts. There is currently no
TrueType
TrueType is an outline font standard developed by Apple in the late 1980s as a competitor to Adobe's Type 1 fonts used in PostScript. It has become the most common format for fonts on the classic Mac OS, macOS, and Microsoft Windows operating sy ...
version of the STIX fonts available, but the STIX Mission Statement includes the intention to create one in the future. However, there exists an unofficial conversion of STIX Fonts (from the beta version release) to TrueType, suitable for use with software without OpenType support.
STIX fonts also include natural language glyphs for Latin, Greek and Cyrillic. The family is designed to be visually compatible with the
Times New Roman
Times New Roman is a serif typeface. It was commissioned by the British newspaper ''The Times'' in 1931 and conceived by Stanley Morison, the artistic adviser to the British branch of the printing equipment company Monotype, in collaboration wit ...
family, a popular choice in book publishing.
Composition
Among the glyphs in STIX, 32.9% have been contributed by the project members. The commercial
TeX
Tex may refer to:
People and fictional characters
* Tex (nickname), a list of people and fictional characters with the nickname
* Joe Tex (1933–1982), stage name of American soul singer Joseph Arrington Jr.
Entertainment
* ''Tex'', the Italian ...
vendor and TeX font foundry
MicroPress has been contracted to create the additional glyphs. The STIX project will also create a TeX implementation. Goals also include incorporating the characters into
Unicode
Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology Technical standard, standard for the consistent character encoding, encoding, representation, and handling of Character (computing), text expre ...
, and ensuring that browsers can use them.
Members of the STIX Fonts project, known collectively as the STI Pub consortium, include the
American Institute of Physics
The American Institute of Physics (AIP) promotes science and the profession of physics, publishes physics journals, and produces publications for scientific and engineering societies. The AIP is made up of various member societies. Its corpora ...
, the
American Chemical Society
The American Chemical Society (ACS) is a scientific society based in the United States that supports scientific inquiry in the field of chemistry. Founded in 1876 at New York University, the ACS currently has more than 155,000 members at all d ...
, the
American Mathematical Society
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) is an association of professional mathematicians dedicated to the interests of mathematical research and scholarship, and serves the national and international community through its publications, meetings, ...
, the
Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is a 501(c)(3) professional association for electronic engineering and electrical engineering (and associated disciplines) with its corporate office in New York City and its operation ...
, the
American Physical Society
The American Physical Society (APS) is a not-for-profit membership organization of professionals in physics and related disciplines, comprising nearly fifty divisions, sections, and other units. Its mission is the advancement and diffusion of k ...
, and
Elsevier
Elsevier () is a Dutch academic publishing company specializing in scientific, technical, and medical content. Its products include journals such as ''The Lancet'', ''Cell'', the ScienceDirect collection of electronic journals, '' Trends'', th ...
.
Development process
A beta version of the fonts was released on October 31, 2007. This version does not include enough of the OpenType mathematical layout features present in
Cambria Math
Cambria is a transitional serif typeface commissioned by Microsoft and distributed with Windows and Office. It was designed by Dutch typeface designer Jelle Bosma in 2004, with input from Steve Matteson and Robin Nicholas. It is intended as a ser ...
, so it is not usable to the fullest extent in
Microsoft Office 2007
Microsoft Office 2007 (codenamed Office 12) is an office suite for Windows, developed and published by Microsoft. It was officially revealed on March 9, 2006 and was the 12th version of Microsoft Office. It was released to manufacturing on Novemb ...
. The Latin glyph set included in the beta version does not yet cover all the characters required to typeset in Eastern European languages.
"Final design changes" were declared "complete" at the project website on June 9, 2008. A release by end of May 2009 for the "initial production release" was announced, still without the support for OpenType layout features of Office 2007 or TeX. In September 2009, the fonts went to the final packaging stage. However, in October, missing glyphs were discovered, adding a delay. The fonts were scheduled to be released in April 2010, and released on May 28, 2010.
The project has taken considerably longer than forecast. The website has been updated only intermittently, and thus has regularly been out-of-date, with forecast milestones often being overshot. For example, on 20 July 2011 the main page on the official site stated, "''Version 1.1, which will include fonts packaged for use with Microsoft Office applications, is scheduled for release by the end of 2010.
.. This site was last updated on 1 November
010/nowiki>.''" Version 1.1.0 was released February 24, 2012. This version facilitates equation editing in recent versions of Microsoft Word.
Version 1.1.0 with LaTeX
Latex is an emulsion (stable dispersion) of polymer microparticles in water. Latexes are found in nature, but synthetic latexes are common as well.
In nature, latex is found as a milky fluid found in 10% of all flowering plants (angiosperms ...
support was released on May 29, 2013.
STIX 2.0.0
On December 1, 2016, the official project website announced the release of STIX version 2.0.0. This was created by Ross Mills and John Hudson of Tiro Typeworks. Unlike the previous version, which closely matches Nimbus Roman No. 9 L, it is an original design loosely inspired by a smaller 10 point size of Times New Roman, with a higher x-height
upright 2.0, alt=A diagram showing the line terms used in typography
In typography, the x-height, or corpus size, is the distance between the baseline and the mean line of lowercase letters in a typeface. Typically, this is the height of the let ...
.
In April 2018, the Type 1 version of the STIX Two fonts for use in LaTeX was released. At the same time, the STIX project hosting platform has been migrated to GitHub (https://github.com/stipub/stixfonts/).
Uptake
The STIX Fonts are included in OS X
macOS (; previously OS X and originally Mac OS X) is a Unix operating system developed and marketed by Apple Inc. since 2001. It is the primary operating system for Apple's Mac computers. Within the market of desktop and lapt ...
in versions from Lion
The lion (''Panthera leo'') is a large Felidae, cat of the genus ''Panthera'' native to Africa and India. It has a muscular, broad-chested body; short, rounded head; round ears; and a hairy tuft at the end of its tail. It is sexually dimorphi ...
(10.7) onwards.
The javascript framework MathJax
MathJax is a cross-browser JavaScript library that displays mathematical notation in web browsers, using MathML, LaTeX and ASCIIMathML markup. MathJax is released as open-source software under the Apache License.
The MathJax project started i ...
uses the STIX fonts for including mathematics in web pages. Installing the fonts on the local computer improves MathJax's typesetting speed.
The Math Editor
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
equation editor uses STIX fonts as its primary font.
ESSTIX
A precursor to the STIX project is the ESSTIX (Elsevier Science STIX) font, developed and later donated by Elsevier. It is currently available from the World Wide Web Consortium
The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the World Wide Web. Founded in 1994 and led by Tim Berners-Lee, the consortium is made up of member organizations that maintain full-time staff working to ...
as part of the Amaya (web browser). However, the STIX fonts are not used in most of the peer-reviewed journals published by Elsevier.
See also
* XITS font project
The XITS font project is an OpenType implementation of STIX fonts version 1.x with math support for mathematical and scientific publishing. The main mission of the Times-like XITS typeface is to provide a version of STIX fonts enriched with the ...
References
External links
*
STIX Fonts
a
Everything Fonts
*
* — Free and open source equation editor utilizing STIX Fonts
STIX Two Math
a
Google Fonts
{{DEFAULTSORT:Stix Fonts Project
Typesetting software
Symbol typefaces
Mathematical OpenType typefaces
Transitional serif typefaces
Unicode typefaces
2008 software
Computer-related introductions in 2008
Typefaces designed by John Hudson
IPA typefaces