[XeTeX] STIX Fonts

[Jonathan Kew]

On 13 Jul 2006, at 9:09 pm, Will Robertson wrote:

> On 14/07/2006, at 4:47 , Ralf Stubner wrote:
>
>> Will it be possible to get the math characters from a different
>> font? I
>> think the STIX fonts will include glyphs suitable for text  
>> processing,
>> too, but it might be interesting to mix it with some other text font.
>
> It'll work the same as in regular TeX, so a different font is
> specified for maths.

Right. In TeX, a "math character" is a code that specifies a type  
(ordinary, binary operation, opening, closing, punctuation, etc), a  
family (0..15) which maps to a font (actually, to three fonts for the  
three sizes, text, script, and script-script), and a character code  
(0..255) in that font.

In the next release of XeTeX this is extended so that a XeTeX math  
character has a type (as in TeX), a family (0..255), and a character  
code (0.."10FFFF).

So whether the math characters come from the same font as the text is  
just a question of how the math families are set up -- just as in  
regular TeX.

Beyond that, it'll be a small matter of macros to deal with all the  
naming, etc., for those who don't actually enter all the math as  
literal Unicode text in the source. :)

Of course, all the existing definitions in plain.tex, etc., will  
still work unchanged for all the existing TFM-based, 8-bit fonts.

JK