Title: Standardizing OpenType math fonts
Summary: italic corrections, accents, rules, primes, parameters, and other OpenType and Unicode math difficulties.
Full text of article: publicly available now.
Authors: Mikael P. Sundqvist, Hans Hagen
Publication: TUGboat volume 44, number 2 (2023), pages 226-232
DOI (this page):
10.47397/tb/44-2/tb137sundqvist-otmath
(previous doi
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Category: Fonts
Difficulty: Intermediate Plus
Abstract: ConTeXt has always had a good support for the typesetting of mathematics. ConTeXt MkII uses the pdfTeX engine and hence traditional (Type 1) fonts. Several math fonts are available, specifically designed to work seamlessly with TeX. ConTeXt MkIV, the successor version, utilizes the LuaTeX engine, providing support not only for traditional fonts but also for OpenType Unicode math fonts. Unlike the XeTeX engine, which interpreted these new fonts in a manner similar to traditional TeX fonts, LuaTeX adheres more closely to the (unfortunately somewhat vague) OpenType specification.
When new fonts appeared, some were more like the traditional fonts, others more like OpenType Unicode math fonts. This leads to difficulties in achieving consistent results across different fonts and might be one reason that the Unicode engines are not yet used as much as they probably should.
In autumn 2021 we started to discuss how to improve the typesetting of OpenType Unicode mathematics, and it was natural to go on and do this for the LuaMetaTeX engine, and hence for ConTeXt LMTX.