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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Fonts in KFormula
From:       Alfredo Beaumont <alfredo.beaumont () gmail ! com>
Date:       2006-07-19 8:45:10
Message-ID: 200607191045.10890.alfredo.beaumont () gmail ! com
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Hi,

Doing some tests from MathML testsuite I've found that current TeX fonts 
(apart from the rest of their problems) don't behave well with big sizes, and 
they're overall not very good-looking. I have been doing some research, and I 
have found what I consider a much better alternative: Arev fonts 
http://tavmjong.free.fr/FONTS/

Arev font is derived from Bitstream Vera, and shares its license, which means 
that it is Free (Libre) software. They have a number of advantages over 
current TeX fonts:

1) Arev is unicode based, so there's no need map unicode numbers to symbols. 
Currently with TeX fonts this mapping is done mostly manually, so it's a 
pain.

2) Arev has much better coverage of mathematical operators, provinding full 
support of U22xx series

3) Arev behaves great at higher sizes. You can compare the graphical quality 
of a fontsize test:

TeX font; http://www.alfredobeaumont.org/kformula-tex.png
Arev font: http://www.alfredobeaumont.org/kformula-arev.png

I've contacted the author (Tavmjong Bah) and he has offered help to complete 
the features we need and are currently lacking. He even has sent me some 
multipart bracket tests already !

So, what I propose and RFC:

1) Switch from current TeX fonts to Arev fonts as soon as they are ready 
(which means mostly multiparts brackets support). This means package them 
instead of current TeX fonts.

2) Drop completely support for the rest of fonts we are currently using. We 
supposedly support TeX, ESSTIX and Symbol fonts, but the latter two and 
mostly broken. All of these fonts share the same problem: they are not 
unicode based and so, symbols have to be mapped manually. This is the wrong 
way to go IMHO. All of them have worse mathematical support than Arev fonts, 
AFAICT. 

If in the future we want to give support to TeX fonts, we should go the 
GtkMathMLView way, which if I'm not wrong, is based in user defined XML files 
that maps characters to symbols, so that we don't have to maintain them 
manually. This is, however, low priority.

-- 
Alfredo Beaumont Sainz
http://www.alfredobeaumont.org/blog.cgi
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