Typesetting mathemathics

By delivering a modernization of the 8 widely used GhostScript text font families, through both extending their glyph repertoire and delivering in the OpenType format, the TeX Gyre project has become a major font undertaking of the TeX community.

However, in contrast to the Latin Modern fonts, it is impossible to typeset “real” mathematical papers using only TeX Gyre fonts, because so far math symbols are scarcely represented. The available symbols should suffice for typesetting of technical texts but not for “strictly mathematical” papers.

Also, if one would like to stay within the OpenType format, typesetting advanced mathematics texts would also be impossible even with the Latin Modern fonts. At this writing (July, 2008) the situation with freely available OpenType fonts is thus such that non-mathematical papers in almost all Latin-based scripts can be typeset with either Latin Modern or TeX-Gyre fonts, but it can not be done so for advanced mathematical papers when trying to stay within the OpenType fonts realm.

Seriously considered, however, are plans for enhancing the TeX Gyre fonts by genuine TeX-oriented and OpenType-oriented math. Math support in the OpenType version of Latin Modern is also included in those plans.

In the preparation for providing math typesetting support with the TeX Gyre fonts, Bogusław Jackowski created in “Appendix G Illuminated” (paper, slides) illustrations to the Appendix G, “Generating Boxes from Formulas”, of Donald E. Knuth's TeX Book.  Appendix G “is to explain the precise positioning rules by which TeX converts a math list into a horizontal list.”  Verify yourself the folk wisdom that one illustration is worth a thousand words.

Ulrik Vieth in his paper "Understanding the aesthetic of math typesetting" builds on the above-mentioned Jacko's “Appendix G Illuminated” in an attempt to obtain a recipe to determine good values of font metric parameters based on simple design parameters such as the x-height or rule thickness. The paper was given at the BachoTeX 2008 conference with presentation slides available. Courtesy of river-valley.tv, there are alsomultimedia recordings of the presentation in several formats.