Asana-Math: close but no cigar

[Vasile Gaburici]

It turns out that STIX beta fonts have a modicum of MATH table (it
didn't occur to me check), but not math script support. Because of the
MATH table, STIXGeneral gets recognized as math font in Office 2007,
but it doesn't really work; as soon as you type anything, you get
Cambria Math instead. See:
http://blogs.msdn.com/murrays/archive/2007/11/06/stix-beta-fonts.aspx.
Also, the way the STIX fonts are spread across multiple otf files
doesn't work with any typesetting software; but hey, if you just want
to gawk at the glyphs with unicode.org's unibook viewer, it's fine.

$ otfinfo -t /usr/share/fonts/stix/STIXGeneral.otf
 251327 CFF
     28 FFTM
     30 GDEF
    242 MATH
     96 OS/2
   4346 cmap
     54 head
     36 hhea
  10026 hmtx
      6 maxp
   6393 name
     32 post
    572 prop
$ otfinfo -s /usr/share/fonts/stix/STIXGeneral.otf
<<nothing>>

$ otfinfo -t /usr/share/fonts/asana-math/asana-math.otf
 354717 CFF
     28 FFTM
     30 GDEF
     80 GPOS
   1268 GSUB
  12168 MATH
     96 OS/2
   2262 cmap
     44 feat
     54 head
     36 hhea
  12076 hmtx
      6 maxp
    128 morx
  15289 name
     32 post
    542 prop
$ otfinfo -s /usr/share/fonts/asana-math/asana-math.otf
DFLT		Default
grek		Greek
latn		Latin
math		<unknown script>
$ otfinfo -f --script=math /usr/share/fonts/asana-math/asana-math.otf
dtls	<unknown feature>
onum	Oldstyle Figures
salt	Stylistic Alternates
ssty	<unknown feature>


On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 6:24 AM, Vasile Gaburici <vgaburici at gmail.com> wrote:
> The STIX fonts do **NOT** currently have the math OpenType script.
> What this means is that they have nice collection of glyphs, but no
> special layout features, so they're pretty useless for actually
> typesetting something with them. The math script, aka MATH table, is a
> MS extension to OpenType. MS has not yet officially submitted any
> documentation for these math layout extensions -- and they are quite
> extensive -- not even in the draft 1.5/1.6 OpenType spec. Despite
> this, it is the de-facto OpenType math standard, and support for it
> has appeared in FOSS projects.
>
> These extensions are implemented only in the Cambria Math font (MS),
> and now in Asana Math (FOSS). Fonts using these extensions are
> currenly usable only in MS Office 2007 (and some other minor non-FOSS
> products), but out of the FOSS world only XeTeX supports them right
> now. LuaTeX is scheduled to add support by the end of this year,
> together with the release of the GUST Math font.
>
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 5:52 AM, Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams
> <ivazqueznet at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, 2008-08-13 at 05:41 +0300, Vasile Gaburici wrote:
>>> It's nice to see that the first (& only?) FOSS OpenType math font,
>>
>> STIXFonts? Well, not quite FOSS yet, but soon hopefully...
>>
>> http://www.stixfonts.org/user_license.html
>>
>> --
>> Ignacio Vazquez-Abrams <ivazqueznet at gmail.com>
>>
>