Announced the development of fonts STIX version 2.0.0, aimed at improving their text component
The creation of so-called "text" fonts is one of the most complex, subtlest and noblest arts. Indeed, in all situations, they are designed not only to stimulate a sense of respect for the typed text, but also to take into account the many small and not very technical and tactical nuances associated with the traditions of a particular language. In addition, depending on the specific sphere of use, tasks are faced with truly grandiose fonts: if it’s a university or even a school textbook, then in every way possible to keep the reader interested in science in an inquiring mind, not hesitating to flick it with elements of an “academic spirit”, but not giving signs of dryness and avoiding the slightest "aesthetic overload"; if the document having legal force - clearly withstand the atmosphere of rigor and neutrality, avoiding rigidity and pricklyness; in a fiction or journalistic work - to facilitate the fastest and most glidingly easy reading with the minimum of a stuck eye on the unusual details of a font drawing; finally, in a scientific work, dictionary or encyclopedia - among other things,provide the authors with all the necessary character sets , taking care of preventing cases of undesirable similarities (O + 0, I + l + 1, v + ʋ + ν + υ ...). The latter category requires gigantic financial (so, already by 2007, by the beta stage with a rather limited character set, about a million dollars had been spent on creating STIX fonts ), organizational and human resources, and megacorporations like Microsoft or Google in this case are forced to go to a compromise from the point of view of the drawings: for example, the unit symbol in Segoe UI - the main Microsoft font for interfaces and web documentation - was such a horror that it was radically changed for the release of Windows 8 .
In Soviet times, the solutions to all these problems were assigned to research institutes that developed separate headsets approved by GOSTs with unassuming names ( School , Ordinary New , Encyclopedic , Literary , Journal ), and in modern realities, those who stood in the Times style »Creations led by Times New Roman and STIX (all kinds of modifications of the unforgettable Knutian Computer Modern, which are not very suitable for a set of at least something that differs from mathematical abstractions and quantum-mechanical calculations, have nothing to do with web designers: in direct drawing they are excessively dry, and in italics they are old-fashioned heavy; as for Cambria, then ... this is a separate conversation). But if the former is not free from the license and is often openly sloppy from an artistic and typographic point of view, then the latter at the given moment represents the main hope of those who seek to observe the aesthetic quality of texts related to the exact sciences.
And to be honest, I, long and eagerly following the development of the project, thought that another fifty years should pass before STIX, recently available in both the web and LaTeX versions, reaches that level of equipment OpenType-features, which now houses the font Times New Roman version 6.80, but last week a ray of hope suddenly flashed !
... pleased to announce that version 2.0.0 - the new generation of STIX - is currently under development. In this release, attention will be paid mainly to a significant refinement of the text part of the font and its alignment with the high requirements of professionals in the field of scientific and technical publishing and scientists ...
The approximate date is the beginning of 2015, but from previous experience I can say that I will be glad if the real product comes out at least by the end of 2015.
In general, first of all, to understand the STIX font level, I recommend that, in addition to Wikipedia , look at the history of its development and read this pdf document (unfortunately, already 2007).
Without repeating what is stated there, I’ll just draw attention to a “funny” fact: the birth of a star back in 1995 was made possible thanks to ... the Elsevier resource (a person named Arie de Ruiter) - an organization whose activities, I remember, were mentioned at least last year in two articleson Habrahabr, but, alas, in a somewhat negative aspect ...
It is STIX that is the main workhorse of the javascript project MathJax, which came as a standard for displaying mathematical formulas in browsers and used both on Wikipedia and Stackexchange . Chrome developers are also forced to refer to MathJax , while they are not yet able to implement MathML support in their brainchild, and in Firefox, even the generation of normal MathML rendering was made possible only thanks to STIX.
So, the first question: what is the “text part” of STIX at the moment? So far, absolutely nothing that would be useful for a text in Russian: kerning pairs for Latin, suitable for use on sizes from 8 to 12 points(from the point of view of a web designer, this is equivalent to a complete lack of kerning) and several standard ligatures.
The second question: what is the desired (only from the point of view of the author of these lines, of course) level of the text part? For a visual demonstration, it is best, perhaps, to provide the source text in HTML + CSS format and a picture of what Firefox renders into. I will do this in the order of my own priorities: accent, kerning, superscript and subscript indices, fractions and case-sensitive mode, and since Times New Roman is deprived of the last three features, you have to use, say, Constantia:
СВЁКЛОПОДЪЁ́МНИК УЗНАЮ́Т
СВЁКЛОПОДЪЁ́МНИК УЗНАЮ́Т
Удивительный = DEVASTATING
Удивительный = DEVASTATING
Катера ходят от точки A₁ до точки B₂
Катера ходят от точки A1 до точки B2
и встречаются на пристани с 7⁴⁰ до 17³⁵
и встречаются на пристани с 740 до 1735
Бассейны заполнены на 4/5 и 1/8 объема
Бассейны заполнены на 4/5 и 1/8 объема
ЗНАНИЕ – СИЛА! ТАНК Т-34
ЗНАНИЕ – СИЛА! ТАНК Т-34
What are we observing?
- With stress everything is clear. It’s okay if this sign came as a separate symbol, but having zero width, it climbs a neighbor in a completely impudent manner. And I don’t understand why to design such characters in this way, knowing that the font does not have the correct positioning. The result is simply the absence of a fallback mode: the same combination of characters, if displayed in a "pumped" font, looks as it should, otherwise it either displays something meaningless or the user does not notice that the authors in this place provided for some additional sign.
- The failure after “U” is a glaring gap, but compare the combinations VA, TAT with, again, the formal presence of kerning!
- The axiom is clearly evident: the built-in indexes look much better than the rendering of the user agent (in this case, the browser). I must say that this is not always pronounced and Constantia here is not the most typical example, but in some cases the browser can issue such indexes that will look like an elephant in a china shop. Well, if the program allows you to give them style, but in this case, with an elementary change in font, all harmony will be destroyed. Nevertheless, in an official document distributed along with archives of STIX fonts, concerning over- / subscript characters (as well as fractions, by the way) some kind of phrase is not clear to me about the preference for using markup in such situations. But wait a minute, because any font already contains a superscript unit, two and three: ¹, ², ³. Is it not logical to complete this series, especially since in Unicode the corresponding places are already reserved? And then the user will decide whether to use artificial or built-in indexes.
- And this feature (frac) is one of the unconditional signs of typographic advancement of the font. Unfortunately, too often it is left behind: it’s enough to say that even in Cambria - a font that, it would seem, by its nature should not do without it, it exists only formally, in a truncated way (I won’t go into specific details now)! Nevertheless, I insist: “human” fractions quite significantly increase the attractiveness of the text compared to ordinary numbers separated by a fractional symbol.
- We draw attention to the position of the dash and hyphen.
The development of the Open Type MATH Table is not so relevant, but it is undoubtedly important (here the main obstacle will still be the support by browsers or MathJax) and the addition of a capital, the presence of which in the Times-like font is generally a casuistic rarity.
And with defiant acuteness, the problem of creating a web version suitable for presentation to a mass user presents itself. Yes, formally, the font seems to have been released in web format, but the main task - to display everything smoothed, clearly and cleanly at any size on any screen in all statistically significant OS (especially in the Windows environment) - has not been solved. Alas, I'm afraid this direction is not listed in the priorities of the developers ...
This is how I imagine the development priorities, realizing that, of course, this announcement in itself is not a reason to jump for joy to the authors of Russian-language texts, since the details of what exactly the developers understand as “finalizing the text part” are unknown. For example, I will not be very pleased if they decide to continue the practice of kerning only for certain physical dimensions in print or don’t add stress support for the Cyrillic alphabet (including the letter "ё"). Nevertheless, I think that professionals and enthusiasts can already begin to take a closer look and try on STIX, directing complaints about noticed shortcomings, for example, here .