7.7 Font Rendering by Browser

Table 21 summarizes the quality of mathematics output, by font, for various combinations of platforms and browsers. Three things to keep in mind when examining this table:

1) We are not evaluating the overall quality of the MathML layout, only the availability of reasonably compatible font styles and how nicely the fonts are rendered. That is, is there a mixture of serif and sans serif text in a single expression? Are the characters sharp and clear? Are the characters blurry? Do they appear thin or stretched? For example, the STIX fonts are rated as good quality when rendered by Safari on OS X — even though our CSS based MathML rendering with Safari can not adequately handle “stretchy” operators.

2) The font’s appearance on an LCD display is evaluated. It does not consider printed page or CRT rendition quality.

3) The evaluation is completely subjective, based solely on our opinion. Others may feel differently. We have, however, actually observed a variety of test pages under each of these configurations.

Design Science’s Euclid fonts were tested on Windows 7 by installing an old version of the software (i.e. MathPlayer 2.1d) that can only use MathPlayer’s native font set. The current release of MathPlayer uses Cambria Math or STIX fonts, when they are available, in lieu of Euclid.