Re: MathML status in Firefox

I should mention this thread:
http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.tech.mathml/browse_thread/thread/1b503df0b108bbf9

>> 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.

Well, it would certainly make the world a better place if MS released
cambria math so that it could be bundled into open source OS
distributions, or, at least, into open source browser distributions.

> 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)

"Big unicode fonts" not withstanding (I do understand that to be the
main event), I don't think my correspondent had such munging in mind.

My private uncontrolled experiment in a very Western environment seems
to indicate that if I hide the stix-beta fonts from FF 3 and instead
place the old Wolfram math* and Design Science eu* truetype fonts in
/usr/local/share/fonts/truetype, things look better.  As I said, I
don't have font expertise, I don't know understand how these fonts
work with FF 3, and I don't know if this practice is reasonably
robust.

Am I correct in thinking that the math* and eu* are what Karl Tomlinson
(reference above) called "category 3"?

Thanks.

                                    -- Bill