Melville, NY, June 10, 2002 – After years of planning, a group of scientific publishers today formally announced the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) font creation project and the launch of the STIX web site at http://www.stixfonts.org. The STIX publishers aim to develop a comprehensive set of fonts for mathematics and other special characters used in Scientific, Technical, and Medical publishing. The web site provides information for potential users within the scientific and publishing communities, and a special area for software developers who may want to incorporate support for the STIX Fonts into their products.
Six publishers – the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Institute of Physics (AIP), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the American Physical Society (APS), Elsevier Science, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) -- came together to design, fund and manage the STIX project. They have awarded the font development contract to a respected font development company, which has begun the process of designing and delivering nearly eight thousand characters/glyphs. The design submissions of the various character sets are currently being evaluated by a Technical Review Committee consisting of representatives of the six participating publishers.
There is currently a clear need for a new font set for mathematical and other scientific symbols, especially in the area of on-screen display in electronic publishing. Today, scientists must assemble scientific symbols and special characters from a variety of fonts, many of which may vary in character style, positioning, or size. The resulting documents typically have an unsatisfactory, jumbled appearance. Even more importantly, when posted to a web site, these documents may not be properly rendered unless the viewers of the document have all of the same specialized fonts available on the computer workstations they are using. This new set of fonts, known as the STIX Fonts, will solve both of these problems, serving the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation all the way through to final publication, both in electronic and print formats. It will unify support for all special symbols and alphabets into a single, comprehensive font set.
The STIX fonts will be made available, under royalty-free license, to anyone, including publishers, software developers, scientists, students and the general public. Target for completion of the project is the Fall of 2003.
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 mission will be fully realized when:
For more information visit the STIX Fonts web site at http://www.stixfonts.org/.
For the STIX Fonts project: T.C. Ingoldsby (Chairman) American Institute of Physics 2 Huntington Quadrangle, Suite 1NO1 Melville, NY 11747-4502 Phone: +1 516 576 2265 Fax: +1 516 576 2327 Email: tingoldsby@aip.org Arthur Smith American Physical Society One Research Road Ridge, NY 11961-9000 Phone: + 1 631 591 4072 Email: apsmith@aps.org