7.1 STIX Fonts
STIX is a consortium of scientific publishers (the AIP, IEEE, AMS, ACS, APS and Elsevier) that decided in 1995 to compose a common set of digital fonts to accurately display every character required for electronic publication of scientific and mathematical documents. After years of compiling required characters and amending Unicode specifications to comply with these needs, a set of fonts conforming to these specifications was released for testing on 31 October 2007. After a relatively short test period, the beta was closed in January 2008. After an extended period of refinement, the STIX fonts were released into production on 28 May 2010. The initial production release was under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1, which essentially makes the fonts royalty free, freely distributable, and freely modifiable (as long as the modified fonts don’t use the original names).
Table 4 summarizes the coverage of STIX’s “general” unicode mathematical character set. Unlike some mathematical fonts, STIX provides the traditional Roman, bold, italic, and bold italic font variants. As you might expect, these font variants primarily support text displayed in mathematical expressions rather that alternate forms of operators and symbols. In addition to it’s “general” fonts, STIX also provides specialized fonts for drawing integrals and other mathematical symbols in a variety of sizes.
| Unicode Block | Description | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| Roman | ||
| U+0370–U+03FF | Greek and Coptic | 93 glyphs |
| U+2070–U+209F | Superscripts and Subscripts | 1 glyph |
| U+2200–U+22FF | Mathematical Operators | 256 glyphs |
| U+2300–U+23FF | Miscellaneous Technical | 61 glyphs |
| U+27C0–U+27EF | Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A | 43 glyphs |
| U+2980–U+29FF | Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B | 128 glyphs |
| U+2A00–U+2AFF | Supplemental Mathematical Operators | 254 glyphs |
| Glyph Variants | 995 glyphs | |
| Bold | ||
| U+0370–U+03FF | Greek and Coptic | 93 glyphs |
| U+2070–U+209F | Superscripts and Subscripts | 1 glyph |
| U+2200–U+22FF | Mathematical Operators | 233 glyphs |
| U+2300–U+23FF | Miscellaneous Technical | 15 glyphs |
| U+27C0–U+27EF | Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A | 4 glyphs |
| U+2980–U+29FF | Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B | 10 glyphs |
| U+2A00–U+2AFF | Supplemental Mathematical Operators | 57 glyphs |
| Glyph Variants | 293 glyphs | |
| Italic | ||
| U+0370–U+03FF | Greek and Coptic | 92 glyphs |
| U+2200–U+22FF | Mathematical Operators | 2 glyphs |
| Glyph Variants | 205 glyphs | |
| Bold Italic | ||
| U+0370–U+03FF | Greek and Coptic | 92 glyphs |
| U+2200–U+22FF | Mathematical Operators | 2 glyphs |
| Glyph Variants | 273 glyphs | |
The STIX fonts are set in a serif type face that is intended to work well with Times-like fonts. This can lead to subtle font style mismatches when STIX math fonts are used with sans serif text fonts.
In total, 29 font files (open type) are included in Version 1.0 of the STIX distribution. At the time of the release, STIX indicated that it intends to repackage these fonts so that they are suitable for use with Microsoft Office (version 1.1) and LaTeX (version 1.2).
The beta release of STIX version 1.1 was on 6 October 2011. The production release of the STIX version 1.1 fonts was 23 February 2012. The version 1.1 fonts were packaged in two separate configurations:
The original “STIX General” 29 file bundle, and
a 5 file “STIX Word” bundle.
The “STIX Word” bundle consists of four text fonts (STIX-Bold, STIX-BoldItalic, STIX-Italic, STIX-Regular), and one symbol font (STIXMath-Regular).
One industrious soul, Kahled Hosny, has packaged the STIX 1.0 fonts as a set of open type fonts (xits-bold, xits-bolditalic, xits-italic, xits-regular, xits-math) suitable for Microsoft Office, XeLaTeX, and LuaTex. He refers to his packaging as the XITS fonts due to STIX licensing restrictions on naming derivative works and his intended implementation of right to left mathematical typesetting capabilities. A XITS packaging of the STIX 1.1 beta fonts is also available.
The current TeX Live distribution ships with both the STIX and the XITS packaging of the fonts.