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| Fonts Program |
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One of the biggest problems of writing scientific equations on a computer is the fonts to draw symbols. Latex has thousands of tags representing also thousands of symbols and currently there is not a single font that is capable of representing them all. Instead programs have to use a variety of fonts many of them with different styles and proportions which often can make an equation look quite odd. And as this was not enough many fonts too are proprietary and thus not only they have to be bought (or bought the program where they come) as also they cannot be used in other scientific projects.
Given all this it is not difficult then to understand why IO Software had no choice but to develop the “Kleio Math Fonts”. If we wanted the scientific expressions produced by Equations! to have a consistent look we had to develop our own fonts.
Challenges
Drawing a symbol for a font by itself is not difficult, but making all symbols to look with the same style and same proportions is a completely different matter. To complicate matters even more when we started the project we decided the fonts would adhere to the 16 bits Unicode code charts. However, for our horror, we later found out that if we wanted the equations to align correctly with document contents of Microsoft software the fonts could only be in 8 bits format. For more that we wanted the fonts to respect the Unicode table, and spare us a lot of work, we could not ignore that many users of Equations would be using Microsoft Office, and thus we had no choice but to abandon for the time the Unicode support.
The Future
The Kleio Math Fonts is an ongoing project. Currently it provides support for 692 LaTeX tags, but we plan to extend this over the next months, eventually until we support all LaTeX tags (which may well take quite some time).
We plan also to release the Unicode version of the fonts. Although these cannot be used together with Equations! they can be useful for other scientific projects.
We believe that our fonts development program, together with the Equation Library and Community Forums are a clear statement of our commitment to the future of Equations!.
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