[duxuser] New font for math and science
- From: "Senk, Mark J." <zia7@xxxxxxx>
- To: "'duxuser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx'" <duxuser@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 8 Nov 2002 12:10:35 -0500
I got this article from a news update compiled by Will Smith. I imagine
this is related to Unicode, but maybe fonts are not directly linked to the
codes they portray.
I hope it will be possible to easily translate these symbols to Braille
using software.
-- article --
The Noah's Ark of the Web, 7,000 Characters at a Time
By JEFFREY SELINGO
IT'S one of the most frustrating problems encountered when passing
documents back and forth electronically: the little square boxes that
mean a font someone else used to create the file cannot be rendered on
your computer. While Portable Document Format, or PDF, files, which
essentially are copies of printed pages, have helped mitigate the
problem for most computer users, that solution has not satisfied
scientists and mathematicians, whose formulas and equations contain
many symbols.
Using those symbols on the Web has been particularly inconvenient.
Most publishers use the symbol-friendly PDF format, but then
researchers cannot easily embed links to other files or background
information within those documents as they can with HTML files. But
HTML documents have their own drawbacks. For instance, they often
display equations as separate graphic images that cannot be resized or
searched and greatly increase the size of the file.
Now a new set of fonts being developed by six publishers of
scientific, technical and medical journals promises to contain every
character - more than 7,000 in all - that might be needed in a
technical article published in any scientific discipline. When
complete, sometime next fall, the fonts will be shared freely with
publishers, software manufacturers and scholars, under the condition
that they not be altered.
"This work is a breakthrough for publishers and scientists," said Tim
Ingoldsby, director of business development at the American Institute
of Physics, one of the publishers working on the project, called the
Scientific and Technical Information Exchange, or STIX
(www.stixfonts.com <www.stixfonts.com> ). "The display of math symbols in
publishing has
always been difficult, but those problems have only become worse with
the Web."
The set of STIX fonts will work very much like the Symbol or Zapf
Dingbats fonts in most applications, where users choose from a grid of
dozens of characters. The STIX font will have the appearance of a
Times font, but the characters will not look any different if a user
switches to a different font, like Courier or Helvetica, Mr. Ingoldsby
said. "The symbols will work with pretty much any font," he said.
Mr. Ingoldsby said most scientific characters lack "flavor" - they are
quite plain to look at - so adding one of those symbols to a document
composed using, for instance, a serif font, which has fine lines
projecting from the main strokes of the letter, will not make the
scientific character stand out. Designers are also adding the
alphabet, numbers and other common characters to the STIX font, so,
Mr. Ingoldsby said, there will be no need to switch between fonts.
"This is meant to replace the font which people use today called New
Times Roman," he said.
About 200 characters of the STIX fonts are being finished each month,
Mr. Ingoldsby said. So far, about half of the 7,000 characters have
been completed.
With so many symbols, however, the STIX fonts could be cumbersome to
use. The developers are working to come up with a method that will
make it relatively easy for users to find the symbols they want.
Symbols will probably be organized by type or subject, with the user
selecting a category (and possibly a subcategory) from drop-down
menus. A grid of symbols in that category will then appear, from which
the user can choose the appropriate one.
Creating a new font set is a complicated process. First, developers
must correctly copy the shape of each character. Then they must adjust
its metrics, or how the character is positioned in the space in which
it is supposed to fit. And finally, they must make another set of
adjustments to be sure the character looks good on a computer screen.
William H. Mischo, head of the Grainger Engineering Library
Information Center at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign,
said that the STIX project had the potential to solve a problem that
dates back to the 1400's, when Gutenberg first conceived of movable
type.
"The two biggest problems since then for properly rendering
intellectual works have been tables and mathematics," Mr. Mischo said.
"Here we are in the digital age and we're still having these
problems."
Because math equations have been included in Web pages mostly as
static images, as either a PDF or a graphics file, scholars have not
been able to take advantage of many of the Web's distinctive research
capabilities, Mr. Mischo said. For example, a mathematician cannot
just plug a particular equation into Google and expect to find other
scholars working on a similar problem, since the symbols in a graphic
will probably not turn up in a search.
"For someone trying to read a scholarly publication, the current way
of doing things presents difficulties," Mr. Mischo said. "You can't
enlarge, you can't pull it apart and you can't search it."
The lack of a comprehensive font for math symbols presents aesthetic
problems as well. The text in math publications is usually
unattractive because publishers are often forced to cobble together a
variety of fonts to create complex equations.
"Courier may have one set of math characters and Bookman may have
another set of characters, but they are not going to look good
together," said Paul Topping, president of Design Science, a company
in Long Beach, Calif., that makes an equation editor for [2]Microsoft
Word. "STIX will be a coordinated set of fonts that are meant to work
together."
Of course, new ideas are always being developed in math and science,
and some require new symbols. Mr. Ingoldsby, of the American Institute
of Physics, said STIX will be updated when new characters are created.
"We're trying harder to work with authors so they come up with
something new only when there absolutely has to be something new," he
said.
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