7.5 TeX Fonts
As you might have observed from the preceding sections, the major commercial type foundries have not expended much effort on developing mathematical typefaces. From time to time, software houses will commission the development of math fonts, but the type shops rarely develop mathematical fonts for their own purposes. This is true for the obvious reason – scientific/mathematical publishing is a niche market that, for the most part, has developed its own publication solutions.
For the last 25 years, Donald Knuth’s TeX software, and its offspring, have played a major role in publishing mathematically oriented documents. TeX was originally developed to typeset technical documents and pays particular attention to the subtleties of mathematical layout. Many scientific journals accept articles for publication authored in various TeX-centric formats.
Due to this heritage, modern TeX distributions provide a variety of mathematical symbol fonts. The traditional math fonts and packaging formats utilized by TeX can, with the proper massaging, be used to display math in browsers. However, discussion of these fonts and techniques for accomplishing this task are an arcane topic outside the scope of this document. In all likelihood, you already know how to use traditional TeX fonts with your browser if it is the optimal way for you to get the job done.
However, some of the more recent variants of TeX – particularly XeTeX, LuaTeX, and their offspring – utilize fonts implemented in modern Unicode character sets and OpenType formats. These fonts can be easily used on current desktop operating systems in non-TeX environments.
7.5.1 Asana Math
The Asana Math font was developed by Apostolos Syropoulos for the TeX project. It is intended to support font processing features available in XeTeX and LuaTeX. Asana Math is a Paltino compatible typeface and is packaged in OpenType format. It contains all mathematical symbols included in current version of the Unicode specification. Its OpenType format is compatible with recent releases of Microsoft Word. As such, it can serve as a Cambria Math replacement. As seen in Section 2, recent versions of Firefox support Asana Math for native MathML rendering.
Table 16 summarizes the mathematical symbol coverage of Asana-Math.
| Unicode Block | Description | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| U+0370–U+03FF | Greek and Coptic | 83 glyphs |
| U+2000–U+206F | General Punctuation | 33 glyphs |
| U+2070–U+209F | Superscripts and Subscripts | 34 glyphs |
| U+2100–U+214F | Letterlike Symbols | 71 glyphs |
| U+2200–U+22FF | Mathematical Operators | 256 glyphs |
| U+2300–U+23FF | Miscellaneous Technical | 53 glyphs |
| U+27C0–U+27EF | Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A | 45 glyphs |
| U+2980–U+29FF | Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-B | 128 glyphs |
| U+2A00–U+2AFF | Supplemental Mathematical Operators | 256 glyphs |
| U+1D400–U+1D7FF | Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols | 996 glyphs |
| Supplementary Private Use Area B | 654 glyphs | |
7.5.2 Latin Modern
The Latin Modern font family is a recent incarnation of Donald Knuth's Computer Modern fonts. They are produced by the Polish type foundry GUST e-font. The publishers bundle the these fonts in two packages: Latin Modern and Latin Modern Math. The fonts are implemented in the Unicode character set and packaged in OpenType formats.
Table 17 summarizes the mathematical symbol coverage of the Latin Modern Math font. As you might assume, this font family contains all math symbols required for traditional TeX math publication.
| Unicode Block | Description | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| U+0370–U+03FF | Greek and Coptic | 54 glyphs |
| U+2000–U+206F | General Punctuation | 26 glyphs |
| U+2100–U+214F | Letterlike Symbols | 42 glyphs |
| U+2200–U+22FF | Mathematical Operators | 172 glyphs |
| U+2300–U+23FF | Miscellaneous Technical | 40 glyphs |
| U+27C0–U+27EF | Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A | 7 glyphs |
| U+2A00–U+2AFF | Supplemental Mathematical Operators | 30 glyphs |
| U+1D400–U+1D7FF | Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols | 872 glyphs |
7.5.3 TeX Gyre
The TeX Gyre font families are modern incarnations of the Ghostscript fonts (which are, in turn, implementations of PostScript’s core fonts). Section 7.4.5 provides additional information on this subject.
The TeX Gyre fonts are produced by the Polish type foundry GUST e-font. They are implemented in the Unicode character set and packaged in an OpenType format. The publishers bundle these fonts into eight typefaces intended for nontechnical content: Adventor, Bonum, Chorus, Cursor, Heros, Pagella, Schola, and Termes. One mathematical font, TeX Gyre Pagella Math, is available. The Pagella typeface is TeX Gyre’s Palatino equivalent. Obviously, Pagella Math is a Palatino compatible math symbol font.
Table 17 summarizes the mathematical symbol coverage of the TeX Gyre Pagella Math font.
| Unicode Block | Description | Coverage |
|---|---|---|
| U+0370–U+03FF | Greek and Coptic | 55 glyphs |
| U+2000–U+206F | General Punctuation | 33 glyphs |
| U+2200–U+22FF | Mathematical Operators | 237 glyphs |
| U+2300–U+23FF | Miscellaneous Technical | 50 glyphs |
| U+27C0–U+27EF | Miscellaneous Mathematical Symbols-A | 20 glyphs |
| U+2A00–U+2AFF | Supplemental Mathematical Operators | 26 glyphs |
| U+1D400–U+1D7FF | Mathematical Alphanumeric Symbols | 989 glyphs |
| Glyph Variants (many not math related) | 1901 glyphs | |