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Typesetting mathemathics

By delivering the modernization of the Latin Modern family of fonts and 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 and Latin Modern Math 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 with the traditional Latin Modern fonts. Note that currently there there are a few engines that are capable of interpreting OTF math fonts, in this number XeTeX (XeLaTeX), LuaTeX (LuaLaTeX, ConTeXt MkIV), and MS Office® (Word 2007 and 2010); XeLaTeX and LuaLaTeX are based on a unicode-math package, ConTeXt provides its own machinery.

Here is a short/an introductory explanation how to install OTF (math) fonts under various systems.

Therefore, the next step in our project was to provide the OTF math companion fonts for Latin Modern and members of the TeX Gyre family – TG Bonum, TG Schola, TG Pagella, and TG Termes. At the moment, GUST e-Foundry has released Latin Modern Math, TG Pagella Math and TG Termes Math. The two remaining TeX Gyre OTF math fonts are expected to be released in 2013.

A comparison of different OTF Math fonts in use with different engines capable of typesetting mathematics is provided as a pdf file.

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 also multimedia recordings of the presentation in several formats.

Yet another excellent article on OpenType Math internals by Ulrik Vieth, “OpenType Math Illuminated", is a must for those interested in the topic.

There are a few more recent presentations delivered by the members of the GUST e-Foundry at TeX conferences that you may find an interesting supplement to the above publications:

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