News

March 11

The STIX Fonts project team has completed its analysis of the more than 200 feedback comments received during and after the beta test period. Today we are releasing a Frequently Asked Questions document that summarizes our responses. We continue to do some testing in collaboration with software vendors. This testing should conclude by the end of March. In parallel with this work, we are making some refinements to glyph shapes and adding a few characters to the font set. By the end of April, we should be ready to begin preparation of the final release versions. We expect that work to take about two months, followed by a few weeks of internal testing. We thus hope to release the final version some time in July.

Other Items:

January 10, 2008:

The STI Pub Group has terminated the Beta Test period as of 10 January 2008. Thank you to the 13,116 individuals who downloaded the fonts and to the 177 people who provided feedback regarding installation, licensing, and use of the beta fonts. After a recess during the holiday season, we are preparing updated responses to feedback received during the beta test period. We hope to release much more extensive comment/response pages for all aspects of the project within the next two weeks. In particular, we are re-considering the possibility of using an open source font license for the final distribution of the release version of the fonts.

Dec 3:

We continue to receive feedback regarding the STIX Fonts Beta Test release. Additional responses to some of these comments have been posted today to the Messages to Beta Testers page and more will be posted soon. Important NOTE: in working through the comments, we have discovered that the final version of the STIX Fonts License was not used for the beta release. That license has now been revised. The correct license can be viewed here.

Nov 2:

Thank you for the many comments and questions that have been posted to the Web site. We are actively working to respond, but the process will take a few days.

Oct 25:

The beta fonts have been delivered to technical representatives from all of the STI Pub companies, and are being reviewed to uncover any problems. So far the reviews are going well and we have established 31 October as the target date for release of the beta font set. If you have not as yet registered to receive an email alert when the fonts are available, you should do so now using the link, below, on this page.

Oct 12:

The sub-group working on font packaging reports that they will deliver the fonts to the STIX Technical Review Committee for a final check at the end of today. This process should require about ten days once the fonts have been received by TRC members. As soon as we have the fonts, we will establish a firm release date. It now appears that this date will be sometime during the last week of October. In response to comments from open source font licensing experts, we have made one further modification to paragraph 4 of the STIX license, which can be seen here.

Oct 8:

The sub-group working on font packaging reports that they are very close to being ready to release the fonts to the STIX Technical Review Committee for a final check. This process should require about two weeks once the fonts have been received by TRC members. As soon as we have the fonts, we will establish a firm release date. It now appears that this date will be sometime during the last two weeks of October.

The business leaders for this project met on Friday and approved some revisions to the STIX license, which can be seen here.

Sept 19:

A review of the final list of glyphs to be included in the beta version has resulted in a slight upward revision of the final glyph count to 8,047. The new configuration tables reflect this revised count. .We are awaiting the final printouts of the beta STIX Fonts for final review, and expect to receive the printouts this week. The difficulties reported last week regarding use of the Private Use Area (PUA) have been resolved. We are still looking for a beta release by the end of September.

Sept 10:

We have been held up by some problems with the font creation software that has made our assignment of non-Unicode glyphs to the Private Use Area (PUA) difficult. Barring any further problems, a set of STIX Fonts will be generated for final review by the technical team by September 14. The review will require about two weeks. While the review is in progress, we will also be setting the bits in the code range tables, adding metadata to the fonts, and tuning line spacing data. We will also be reviewing the requirements for the Microsoft-specific math tables used by Office 2007, in particular by Word 2007 with the Cambria Math font, to see if we can incorporate this data into the fonts before the beta release. If we determine that adding these tables will delay the beta release, we will leave this work for later, perhaps as a revised beta release. It would be useful for us to know if any of the groups waiting for our beta release plan to make use of these tables. (Our testing shows that the STIX Fonts cannot be used in place of Cambria Math within Word 2007 unless these (undocumented) tables are in place.) It would be useful to hear from any of you who need this support. Our revised target for release is now the end of September.

Aug 20:

The packing of the OpenType version of the STIX Fonts is almost complete. We are resolving a few dozen final corrections and hope to be ready to release the fonts within the next two weeks.

July 24:

Although we were hoping to complete the packaging of the beta test version by 23 July, vacations by some key project team members have forced a delay in the release until mid-August

June 29:

  The design review has been completed, pending a few questions that will be resolved by feedback from the beta test.  The following groups were completed since the last update:

June 12:

Substantial design review progress has been made.  It is possible that we will be ready to release the beta fonts by the end of June, although the release date may slip a little bit into July.

Since last week’s report, the following groups have been completed:

May 4:

Since last week’s report, the following groups have been completed:

The design review continues to make progress, albeit at a slower rate than hoped.  Once all of the design changes are complete, the fonts will be released within two weeks.  Although this review is taking some time, we are confident that the work being done now will result in an essentially complete set for the beta test, and few further revisions will be required prior to final release.

As the review progresses, we are also adding additional math characters that have been added to the Unicode standard for the next revision.  We have also resolved some issues regarding Plane 1 Unicode support in Windows and Macintosh applications.

Apr 24:

For the design review, symbols have been grouped according to common sizes/shapes. Symbols in these groups need to be reviewed together. A particular symbol may appear in more than one group. There were 31 groups identified for the review. The following groups have been completed:

Apr 5:

The font packager has been provided with final redesign instructions. We expect to be able to name the release date within the next week or two.

Mar 19:

The final task remaining for the design review is establishing consistent sizes for various glyphs based on square or circle designs. Samples of all current versions of such glyphs have been sent to the Technical Review Committee members to seek input on optimum sizes for all ranges from each publishing house. Feedback should be complete by the end of next week, and then the designer will be instructed to make the final corrections or additions and the beta fonts will be prepared for release. Confidence remains high that we will release the fonts some time in April. Everyone who registered to receive the beta STIX Fonts will receive an email alert when the fonts are released.

In preparation for the release, an updated set of configuration tables has been prepared. These tables implement the new file names for all of the font files. A table describing the file names and the contents of each is given here. The new configuration tables reflect these revised file names and additional glyphs added to the project during the design review. The current Unicode glyph count stands at 6,942 with an additional 1,077 non-Unicode glyphs making a total for the fonts of 8,019. It is certain that the square and circle review will result in additional Unicode glyphs, but the exact number is not yet determined.

Feb 28:

Work on the design review is proceeding, but at a slower pace than we had anticipated. It now appears that the review can be completed by the end of March. We have discovered some serious inconsistencies in sizes of square and circular symbol glyphs that require some time to sort out. Once the corrections are made, we should be able to quickly release the beta fonts. We will begin to issue revised tables for the various sub-ranges next week.

January 23, 2007:

Parallel efforts continue on completing the design review and resolving packaging issues. A re-alignment of glyphs into separate fonts for Unicode glyphs and non-Unicode glyphs has solved many of the open issues, but problems with getting browsers to properly display Plane 1 glyphs (the math alphabets) remain. We are getting some assistance from Microsoft and Firefox, but so far these issues are not resolved. We do not want to release the beta fonts until we have answers to these questions. It now appears that the earliest that we will be able to release the beta test version is near the end of February. A further update with more details will be provided the week of 29 January.

All news prior to January 2007 has been removed from the web site and archived.