FW: Six Science Publishers Create New Web Font Set

["Hamaker, Chuck" <cahamake@email.uncc.edu>]

-----Original Message-----
From: Joanne Vernieri [mailto:jvernier@aip.org]
Sent: Thursday, June 06, 2002 9:58 AM
To: Hamaker, Chuck
Subject: Six Science Publishers Create New Web Font Set

For Immediate Release

Six Science Publishers Create New Web Font Set:
       The STIX Project (http://www.stixfonts.org)

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:

o Fully hinted PostScript Type 1 and OpenType font sets have been
  created.
o All characters/glyphs have been incorporated into Unicode�
  representation or comparable representation and browsers include program
  logic to fully utilize the STIX font set in the electronic representation
  of scholarly scientific documents.

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