Mozilla 1.9 MathML status and notes

The 1.9 Mozilla branch (for Firefox 3) now uses STIX fonts
(http://www.stixfonts.org/), which provide the best support for
mathematical characters.

If users have previously set the "font.mathfont-family"
preference, then it is best to reset this to the default value.
(URL about:config -> context menu -> Reset)

A Beta release of the STIX fonts is available under this license:

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/stix/beta-license.txt

and may be downloaded from

http://www.mozilla.org/projects/mathml/fonts/stix/STIXBeta.zip


Positioning is currently (very) incorrect with MathML and tables.
This includes <mtable> which is used for matrices, conditionals,
and sometimes alignment of systems of equations.  There is a patch
in this bug

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=363240

that resolves this issue, and Bill Gianopoulos has provided some
unofficial Windows and Linux builds with this patch here:

http://www.wg9s.com/mozilla/firefox/


On MS Windows, sometimes hex boxes are drawn instead of the glyphs
from the STIX fonts:

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=413115
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=382542


Please file a bug if you notice any issues not mentioned here.


BaKoMa TrueType Computer Modern fonts are now normally not used
because their encoding is inconsistent with Unicode
recommendations.

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=161137#c39
https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=400938#c0

However, if a document explicitly requests font-family CMSY10 or
CMEX10 or similar, and the BaKoMa fonts are installed, then these
fonts get used, which will likely result in the wrong symbols
being drawn.  Probably the best work-around for this is to
uninstall these fonts.

If the Computer Modern font family is preferred, then the best
version of this font that I know to recommend is the PostScript
Type 1 implementation by Blue Sky Research and Y&Y, Inc.

http://www.ams.org/tex/type1-fonts.html

I haven't tested these.  They may work reasonably well on Unix,
but I'm not sure about other platforms.