MathML:Fonts
[DONE] Support for STIX fonts
We are mainly relying on STIX Fonts to build Composite Chars and Variants. We should find other variants of characters and add entries for them.
See bug 407101 and bug 569195
[fred] A first patch has been pushed for angle brackets and large operators that should fix some bugs reported by users.
[fred] A second patch has been pushed for stretchy accents. This fixes all stretchy bugs reported by users, at least for small sizes.
[fred] A third patch has been pushed to use STIX fonts 1.0. It also adds size variants for integral symbols.
Support for Asana Math
Asana Math is available under the Open Font License and "includes almost all mathematical Unicode symbols". Unicode Mappings for Composite Chars and Variants are provided, so it would be possible to support them by adding a mathfontAsanaMath.properties. However, it would probably be better to directly read the OpenType MATH table.
See bug 407439
Support for More Unicode Fonts
There are other mathematical unicode fonts that would be interesting to support. Let's mention two of them:
- Cambria Math, which is distributed with many Microsoft product. See bug 372351
- Neo Euler, a free OpenType version of the Euler. See bug 622576
However, Composite Chars and Variants for these fonts are built with non-unicode glyphs and so we can not use our mechanism in its present form.
OpenType MATH table
The OpenType MATH table contains information about Composite Chars and Variants. The purpose is to directly read the tables in the fonts that contain this information rather than maintaining our own mathfonts*.properties.
Improve font installation
Various Unicode fonts are already installed by default on many systems and we should try to support them. However, we should also ensure that supported fonts are really installed so that users do not wonder why MathML is no working correctly on their system. In former versions of Mozilla, a pop-up dialog appeared and invited the user to go to the Fonts for MathML-enabled Mozilla page. This dialog was really not a pleasant UI and has been removed. People proposed to add some kind of automated installation bug 233950 bug 295193. One possible direction could be to use downloadable fonts.