Removal of the font.mathfont-family preference in Gecko 41 and more updates on math fonts

Frédéric WANG <[email protected]> Sun, 14 Jun 2015 16:58:04 -0400

Newsgroups	gmane.comp.web.mathematics,gmane.comp.mozilla.devel.mathml
Message-ID	<[email protected]>

Dear all,

Some of you may be aware of the existence of a "font.mathfont-family"
option in Gecko that provides a list of mathematical fonts for the
rendering of MathML operators. This is can be accessed by entering
"about:config" in the URL bar and bypassing the warning message.

Starting with Gecko 41, this preference option is removed and replaced
with new "font.*.x-math" preferences that let you configure the default
mathematical font to use for MathML formulas (not only operators),
similarly to what is available for "human" languages.

Additionally, in Gecko 41 these preferences will be exposed via the more
user-friendly Font Preference menu that already exists in Firefox,
Thunderbird and SeaMonkey: In the advanced menu, you will be able to
configure "Font for Mathematics". See the attached screenshots of
Jacques Distler's blog in Thunderbird 41.

By the way, the ascent/descent bug
(https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=598900) that was present
for some specific versions of Windows and OpenType MATH fonts is now
fixed, except for the STIX Math font (for which we will have to wait
STIX 2.0, currently under development). This means that all OpenType
MATH fonts but STIX should now be usable on all platforms (see
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Mozilla/MathML_Project/Fonts#Fonts_with_a_MATH_table).
Remember, we plan to remove support for old fonts without a MATH table
in Gecko, so be sure to upgrade to the newest fonts as soon as possible,
if that's not already done.

--
Frédéric Wang
maths-informatique-jeux.com/blog/frederic

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thunderbird-stixmath.png (image/png, 162.2 KB) - not displayed

thunderbird-asanamath.png (image/png, 161.8 KB) - not displayed

thunderbird-texgyrebonummath.png (image/png, 168.8 KB) - not displayed

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