Asana-Math: close but no cigar

[Vasile Gaburici]

It turns out that fontforge can already grok MATH tables
[http://fontforge.sourceforge.net/math.html], so I had a look at the
MATH tables oft the three contenders.

No surprises that STIX doesn't work: a few constants are defined, but
the rest of the sub-tables, like accents, shapes or constructions are
completely empty. Calling this release a beta was a bit of a
stretch...

On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 7:55 AM, Vasile Gaburici <vgaburici at gmail.com> wrote:
> Unlike Office 2007, XeTeX checks if a font contains the math script,
> not the MATH table to decide whether it will work or not for Unicode
> math. So with STIX it complains:
>
> Package fontspec Warning:
>    Font "STIXGeneral/ICU" at 12.0pt does not contain script 'Math'
>
> And predictably, it doesn't work:
> http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gaburici/uni-asana.pdf
> http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gaburici/uni-cambria.pdf
> http://www.cs.umd.edu/~gaburici/uni-stix.pdf
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 7:34 AM, Vasile Gaburici <vgaburici at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 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>
>>>>
>>>
>>
>