‘The mission of the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) font creation project is the preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community’.
STIX 2 was released 2016 Dec 1.
I have created a variant of the STIX fonts called Mastic, which stands for ‘Mastic is almost STIX’. It is available as Mastic_v1.1.0-beta1_1.zip, under the same licence as the STIX fonts (viz., SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1). It addresses a number of issues in the STIX fonts.
The creation of the Mastic fonts has been my first experience with FontForge and I don’t really know what I’m doing, especially when it comes to hints and kerning, so there may well be problems.
In some fields it is important to distinguish between lower-case
italic v (e.g., velocity) and lower-case italic nu
(e.g., Poisson’s ratio, ν). This distinction can be
made by using a rounded v, which STIX has
as MATHEMATICAL ITALIC
SMALL V (U+1D463). However, the use of characters beyond
the Unicode base plane is still a problem in many applications. Even
if it were not a problem, it is desirable to use a rounded
italic v (and w) in regular text in the same document,
for consistency, and it would be very awkward to have to use the
MATH v and w every time. Therefore, it would be nice if
the regular italic v and w (U+0076
and U+0077) were rounded rather than angular as they are
now in the STIX font. This is the situation in the Computer Modern
font and also in some others, like Palatino, Georgia,
GUST’s
TeX Gyre Bonum
(also the TeX Gyre Pagella and Schola),
Proforma, New Caledonia, Dustismo Roman.
I have therefore modified the lower-case italic v and w in Mastic to be rounded.
The STIX 1.1 fonts did not include any small caps, so I implemented some. I did it by scaling the capital letters by 83% with integer rounding, which resulted in vertical-stem widths equal to those of the original lower-case letters.
Note that in OOo/LO Writer, these small caps must be invoked
by specifying a different font (in this case MasticSC) and not by just
specifying the
font effect, which will cause the font’s
upper-case characters to be scaled to produce artificial small caps.
Similarly, use of the CSS font-variant:small-caps style
on the Web will result in
artificial small caps like
this.
‘True small capital variants (Latin, Cyrillic, and Greek), accessible via the OpenType font feature smcp, have been added’ in STIX 2.
I have modified
the CIRCLED DOT OPERATOR (U+2299) (⊙) in the
regular font to correct its inconsistent size compared with its
neighbours (as pointed out by wiedeking on 2011 Dec 30 in the STIX
issue tracker).
This problem has been fixed in STIX 2.