Version 1.1, 7 June 2021

Version history:

Logical and mathematical symbols: choosing fonts

Brill publications increasingly contain all sorts of logical/mathematical symbols. Although all versions of the Brill typeface have always supported a selected set of mathematical symbols, this is not enough for some kinds of texts, notably philosophical texts dealing with logic. Therefore it became necessary to specify another font next to the Brill fonts. We have chosen STIX2Math because it has been carefully developed over a number of years (much like the Brill fonts) and because it is aimed explicitly at supporting all manner of scientific and technological textual symbols.

Print production (PDF)

As of July 16, 2020, the policy is:

  1. Use mathematical/logical symbols from the Brill fonts where available;

  2. If unavailable in the Brill fonts v. 4.0x, use the STIX2Math font for these symbols.

Download STIX2Math

General information about the STIX fonts project is at the STIX fonts website.

Typesetters should download the latest release version of STIX2Math (the package contains many fonts and font versions, but they need only this one font) from GitHub.

Note that Brill only advocates the use of the STIX2Math font for mathematical/logical symbols not present in the Brill fonts, not any of the other STIX2Text fonts (which are also part of the download package).

Font sizes

XML production, HTML, and CSS

XML logical/mathematical symbol tagging

The XML attribute is @lang: 'und-Zmth'. ‘und’ is the ISO 639 code meaning ‘undetermined’.

Tagging of mathematical/logical symbols not available in the Brill fonts v. 4.0x must be added to XML data. By adding a script attribute to such characters, a STIX2Math web font can then be selected for display purposes later on.

CSS and HTML syntax

In CSS, the following code is essential for a web browser to be able to call a STIX2Math web font:

…

@font-face {
                font-family: 'STIX2Math';
                src: url('STIX2Math.woff2') format('woff2'),
                     url('STIX2Math.woff') format('woff');
                font-style: normal;
                font-weight: normal;
                text-rendering: optimizeLegibility;
}

…

:lang(und-Zmth) {
                font-family: STIX2Math;
                font-size: 88%;
}

…

In HTML, the code to use is

<span lang='und-Zmth'>…</span>

in which … stands for any logical/mathematical symbol which is unavailable in the Brill fonts v. 4.0x.

Windows and macOS

All STIX fonts can be used on both MS Windows and macOS.