An updated survey of OpenType math fonts
Ulrik Vieth · TUGboat · 2023
The city of Cork has become widely known in the T E X community, ever since it gave name to an encoding developed at the European T E X conference of 1990.The 'Cork' encoding, as it became known, was the first example of an 8-bit text font encoding that appeared after the release of T E X 3.0, and was later followed by a number of other encodings based on similar design principles.As of today, the 'Cork' encoding represents only one out of several possible choices of 8-bit subsets from a much larger repertoire of glyphs provided in fonts such as Latin Modern or T E X Gyre.Moreover, recent developments of new T E X engines are making it possible to take advantage of OpenType font technology directly, largely eliminating the need for 8-bit font encodings altogether.During the entire time since 1990 math fonts have always been lagging behind the developments in text fonts.While the need for new math font encodings was recognized early on and while several encoding proposals have been discussed, none of them ever reached production quality or became widely used.In this paper, we review the situation of math fonts as of 2008, especially in view of recent developments of Unicode and OpenType math fonts such as the STIX fonts or Cambria Math.In particular, we try to answer the question whether a 'Cork' math font encoding is still needed or whether Unicode and OpenType might eliminate the need for T E X-specific math font encodings.