Unicode and math, a combination whose time has come — Finally!
Barbara Beeton · 2000
To technical publishers looking at ways to provide mathematical content in electronic form (Web pages, e-books, etc.), fonts are seen as an “f-word”. Without an adequate complement of symbols and alphabetic type styles available for direct presentation of mathematical expressions, the possibilities are limited to such workarounds as .gif and .pdf files, either of which limits the flexibility of presentation. The STIX project (Scientific and Technical Information eXchange), representing a consortium of scientific and technical publishers and scientific societies, has been trying to do something about filling this gap. Starting with a comprehensive list of symbols used in technical publishing, drawn from the fonts of consortium members and from other sources like the public entity sets for SGML as listed in the ISO Technical Report 9573-13, a proposal was made to the Unicode Technical Committee to add more math symbols and variant alphabets to Unicode. Negotiations have been underway since mid-1997 (the wheels of standards organizations grind exceedingly slowly), but things are beginning to happen. This paper will share the latest information on the progress of additional math symbols in Unicode, and the plans for making fonts of these symbols freely available to anyone who needs them.