7.2 Windows Fonts

When Microsoft released its Vista operating system on January 31, 2007, it contained several new ClearType fonts commissioned by Microsoft for the occasion. Most germane to the current discussion was the Cambria Math font. A more recent version of this font ships with Windows 7. For people running older Microsoft operating systems, Cambria Math is also installed along with Microsoft Office 2007, Microsoft Office 2010, Microsoft’s PowerPoint Viewer, or Microsoft’s Office Compatibility Pack.

Given that Cambria Math was initially designed to look best in mathematical documents laid out by Microsoft Office and that it lacks some of the symbols found in the STIX fonts, there has been some inevitable criticism of Cambria Math in typographic circles. However, in the real world, the fact that a highly legible mathematical font optimized for LCD display is available on a large (and growing) number of systems is a boon to publishing mathematics on the internet.

Table 5 summarizes the coverage of Cambria Math’s mathematical character set. Cambria Math only provides an upright font variant. It is typically used in conjunction with the other members of Microsoft’s Cambria font family. When used in this manner, partial coverage for the bold, italic, and bold italic math font variants is provided by other members of the Cambria family.

Bare bones, legacy Windows installations (pristine XP systems) usually get math symbols from the Lucida Sans Unicode font. As the name implies, this is a sans serif font (like Apple Symbols) with the potential for type style mismatches when used with serif text fonts. Several of the preinstalled fonts on legacy Windows systems have minimal math coverage but have decent coverage of Greek symbols.