Re: MathML status in Firefox

> 1.  The STIX fonts (beta only so far, I believe) are not currently
>     available.

well not officially although googling for stixbeta.zip reveals they are
available all over the place. Admitedly it's nota good situation, and I
have no idea why the stix group pulled the beta files such a long time
before the full files are ready.


> 2.  FF2 is said to be going out of support very soon.

Presumably they won't keep it going for ever.

> Someone who is usually on top of these issues has suggested to me
> that I should be using the Wolfram "Math" series with FF3.

I believe FF3 assumes that you have a "big" unicode font with all the
glyphs in unicode position (cf stix or  MS's cambria math) This means
they don't need to keep all the special case tables for the individual
font encodings used by mathematica, TeX etc, but of course it does mean
that the fonts need to be built.

I'm not sure if wolfram's licence would allow someone to take the
mathematica truetype fonts and use fontforge or similar and munge them
into a big unicode math font. (I haven't looked)

> I think that normal consumers of math on the web cannot be expected to
> track down and install special fonts.  What is going to be done about
> that?

well if Stix ever appears I believe it's supposed to come with a licence
that's open enough that it can just get distributed with Operating
systems or browsers or ....
... if it ever appears.

David
(usual disclaimer: I have no knowledge about the stix consortium or
firefox internals or anything else mentioned in this email:-)





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