Is it already possible to use the STIX fonts?

Question

The STIX Fonts Project would provide consistent fonts for some things that are currently missing in LaTeX (e.g. lowercase \mathcal and \mathbb). The website says LaTeX support "will follow in 2011".

Until then is there some way to already use the fonts? Maybe using xelatex instead of pdflatex?

Answer 1

LaTeX support for STIX fonts (Type 1 fonts, TFM files, support packages, etc) have been released few days ago (currently in beta), for people who want to use STIX but cannot/do not want to switch to a modern TeX engine.

Answer 2

Try the xits package:

• Announcement by Khaled Hosny,
• CTAN,
• The XITS font project on github.

Answer 3

Update: TeX Live 2010 (and newer) includes all the prerequisites. So instead of manually installing all the necessary packages, you can just install that. For XeTeX, the fonts (currently) need to reside in the system font directory for easy access, so you might have to copy the XITS otf files to ~/.fonts (or something similar).

---

Since it might help other people too, I'll post how I got the XTIS fonts to work. This was my first time installing TeX packages by hand, so if I did anything in a non-standard or incorrect way please correct me. (I made this post community wiki, so you can edit it.)

My system is Ubuntu 10.04 with TeXLive 2009 installed from the Ubuntu repositories. However something similar should also work on other operating systems (again, this is CW, so please add any instructions). I will install everything for use with XeTeX. There might be some changes for LuaTeX.

In the following, replace ~/texmf by the output of

$ kpsewhich --var-value TEXMFHOME

or

$ kpsewhich --var-value TEXMFLOCAL

First we will install current versions of some prerequisite packages.

$ mkdir ~/texmf
$ cd ~/texmf
$ wget http://mirror.ctan.org/install/macros/latex/contrib/fontspec.tds.zip
$ unzip fontspec.tds.zip
$ mkdir tex/xelatex
$ mv tex/latex/fontspec/ tex/xelatex/

The last two lines are necessary, because otherwise xelatex will select the old version already installed on the system, see Andrew's solution to his question.

$ cd ~/tmp

(or whichever temporary directory you like)

$ wget http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/expl3.zip
$ unzip expl3.zip
$ cd expl3
$ tex l3.ins
$ mkdir ~/texmf/tex/latex/expl3
$ cp *.sty ~/texmf/tex/latex/expl3

$ cd ..
$ wget http://mirror.ctan.org/macros/latex/contrib/xpackages.zip
$ unzip xpackages.zip
$ cd xpackages/
$ tex xbase.ins 
$ tex l3keys2e.ins
$ mkdir ~/texmf/tex/latex/xpackages
$ cp *.sty ~/texmf/tex/latex/xpackages/

Next we will install unicode-math from it's git repository. Alternatively you can download it from CTAN.

$ cd ..
$ git clone "http://github.com/wspr/unicode-math.git"
$ cd unicode-math/
$ tex unicode-math.dtx
$ mkdir ~/texmf/tex/latex/unicode-math
$ cp unicode-math.sty unicode-math-table.tex  ~/texmf/tex/latex/unicode-math/

And now finally the XITS fonts. Instead of the git repository you can download them from http://github.com/khaledhosny/xits-math/downloads.

$ cd ..
$ git clone git://github.com/khaledhosny/xits-math.git
$ cd xits-math/

Now install the .otf files. I did this with Nautilus (the Gnome file manager), but I think you can just copy them to the ~/.fonts directory.

It only remains to tell TeX about the new packages:

$ sudo texhash

To test if everything went right, compile something like

\documentclass{article}

\usepackage{unicode-math}
\setmainfont{XITS}
\setmathfont{XITS Math}

\begin{document}

$\mathcal A = α²$

\end{document}

with xelatex.