Free STIX Fonts to be Released in September

tbspit writes "The STIX fonts project has announced that version 1.0 of the STIX fonts should be released in September 2005. The comprehensive font set is to include mathematical symbols and alphabets, and is intended to serve the scientific and engineering community for electronic and print publication. The STIX fonts should be available as fully hinted Type 1 and True Type fonts. The STIX project will also create a TeX implementation. Progress towards release can be monitored here."

But does it support unicode ?.

[Gopal.V]

The biggest pain I have is getting a single font (yeah, I don't mind a 20 MB font that works) which will work uniformly well with unicode text in different languages.

Why the hell don't these people build a single one that really, truly works ?. Until then I'll be using ArialUni.ttf and suffering badly. (texmf is not bad, but the world just doesn't have enough Hellingman).

How long does it usually take?

[hritcu]

After nearly 10 years of development, the STIX Fonts project is almost complete.

The community is in great need of such fonts. This open source online equation editor [sourceforge.net] is just an example. We had to recommend the use of a shareware pan-unicode font (Code2000 [att.net]) because the only alternative is the proprietary Arial Unicode MS [microsoft.com].

Nevertheless, the time it took them to make STIX almost ready looks hilarious to me. Does anybody know how long does it usually take to design such a font?

Re:How long does it usually take?

[bcrowell]

Does anybody know how long does it usually take to design such a font?
How long does it take to do an oil painting? Well, it depends on the oil painting. Font design is a serious craft, and this is a big font.

Re:How long does it usually take?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the work for TeX and MF were done by his graduate students (most notably Andrew Levy). Knuth's involvement was minimal, and generally to the detriment (ie, the TeX programming language).