Minion Math with unicode-math

Question

This is a little bit off topic as it is not exactly related to TeX.

I saw recently that Minion Math was updated to 1.020 which comes with math table support.

Does any one had a chance to play with this font and use it with unicode-math, and in particular with the LuaTeX engine?

I am very interested in purchasing a complete set of this nice fonts family. However I am concerned about its usability with the unicode-math package. Unlike Cambria Math or XITS Math, Minion Math does not come with a single font, instead it has 20 (4 weights 5 optical sizes) fonts. So it will be better to know how it works before spending 700 euro.

In particular, say the following minimal document, will it use correct optical size of the fonts for each of the three formulas? I had trouble with using correct optical size of Minion Pro fonts with fontspec. I worked it out with the SizeFeatures and OpticalSize. However, I am not so sure if the same strategy will work for Minion Math with unicode-math. In addition, in Cambria Math, etc., the bold symbols and alphabets are chosen directly from the unicode math enabled fonts. But in Minion Math, from the glyph tables on their websites, there seems no bold alphabets in each font. So will the mathbf in the document below work out of box?

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{fontspec}
\setmainfont{Minion Pro}
\usepackage{unicode-math}
\setmathfont{Minion Math} % or what ever fonts name actually is

\begin{document}
\fontsize{5}{5}\selectfont
\[ \mathbf{E} = mc^2 \]
\fontsize{10}{10}\selectfont
\[ \mathbf{E} = mc^2 \]
\fontsize{36}{36}\selectfont
\[ \mathbf{E} = mc^2 \]
\end{document}

Answer 1

the release date for Minion Math 1.020 with MATH table support is October 2011 (as I still need to perform some tests before release).

In my tests so far Minion Math works (with fontspec and unicode-math) with LuaLaTeX and XeLaTeX, with slightly better results / less problems in LuaLaTeX. Optical sizes in math do work (with appropriate options for \setmathfont).

Minion Math does fully support 4 different weights. In the current setup, Bold Math (Regular and Italic) is taken from a bolder weight, so your example will need a few extra commands (\setmathrange) and will not work exactly, but almost "out of the box". The \fontsize commands should work (I will check that).

Answer 2

I suggest you contact the author(s) of this font family -- their website is http://www.typoma.com/en/fonts.html -- and ask them if they provide some code templates to help loading their fonts via the commands of the fontspec and/or unicode-math packages. I could imagine that the font-loading commands will depend importantly on whether you're going to get "just" the standard, i.e., "text"-size (ca 9-12 pts), optical-size font or one or both of the smaller optical-size fonts as well. Another consideration is whether you will have just the standard-size Minion Pro text (as opposed to math) font font or if you'll have several of the other optical-sized text fonts of this font family.

Given that the font-loading commands of Xe(La)TeX are rather different from those of LaTeX2e, I'm virtually certain though that commands such as fontsize{5}{6}\selectfont won't work. Instead, you'll probably have to use the AddFontsFeature feature (pun intended) of fontspec package to instruct TeX how to assign optical-size fonts to actual ranges of font sizes. E.g., you'll need to tell TeX that for anything less than or equal to 6 pts, you'd want to use the "Tiny" optical size (assuming, of course, that you have this particular font at hand).

Answer 3

Although this answer is rather late (!), I have recently used Minion Math with unicode-math, mainly with xetex (as luatex is a little slow). I have posted an example of an end document, which contains the unicode-math/fontspec template file within it, along with examples of the same document in other fonts, at http://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/gv219/aofd/fonts/.

Update: April 2017: I have used minion-math with xetex for an entire book, now in press. See http://empslocal.ex.ac.uk/people/staff/gv219/aofd/

See also this question and answer: Fonts for Mathematics and Text