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Target Release Date Established for the STIX Fonts ProjectMELVILLE, NEW YORK, 17 May 2005 — A group of scientific publishers announced today that a target date of September 2005 has been set for the release of STIX Fonts. STIX Fonts is a free, comprehensive set of special characters, mainly mathematical, that represents a significant breakthrough in scientific, technical, and medical publishing. The successful completion of the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) Fonts project will alleviate the need for publishers to assemble symbols from a variety of fonts. Perhaps more important, when posted to a web site, documents using STIX Fonts will be properly rendered, regardless of the fonts installed on a particular computer. The six publishers that came together to design, fund and manage the STIX project include the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Institute of Physics (AIP), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the American Physical Society (APS), Elsevier, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE). The publishers also announced today the re-launch of the STIX Fonts web site at http://www.stixfonts.org. The revised web site provides important details for potential users within the scientific and publishing communities. It also offers a special area for software developers who may want to incorporate support for the STIX Fonts into their products. The participating publishers awarded the font development contract to MicroPress, Inc., a respected font designer, which has created and delivered over seven thousand characters/glyphs required for these comprehensive fonts. The final few hundred characters will be delivered before the end of July 2005. A beta test version of the fonts will be distributed in early summer 2005. "Until now, scientists had to navigate dozens of obscure fonts to display the mathematics of science on the web,” said John Ewing, Executive Director of the American Mathematical Society. “This project eliminates that Tower of Babel , organizing thousands of mathematical symbols into a unified whole. It revolutionizes the display of mathematics." “The STIX Fonts will be made available, under royalty-free license, to anyone, including publishers, software developers, scientists, students and the general public,” said Tim Ingoldsby, Director of Business Development for the American Institute of Physics and chairman for the STIX project. “Scientists from all over the world have contacted us to express their support. We are delighted that the project is nearly complete.” By making the fonts freely available, the STIX project hopes to encourage the development of applications that make use of these fonts. In particular the STIX project will create a TEX implementation that TEX users can install and configure with minimal effort. TEX is a computer language designed for typesetting, with particular application to mathematics and other technical material. The STIX publishers set as their mission:
The mission should be completed in 2005. For more information visit the STIX Fonts web site at http://www.stixfonts.org. For the STIX Fonts project: |
