Unicode Maths using OpenType fonts
The ISO standard Universal Coding Scheme (UCS), which is commonly known as Unicode, was adopted early by the designers of TrueType (TTF) and OpenType (OTF) fonts. The flexibility of the fonts offers hope, for the first time, of a uniform method for typesetting essentially any language.
TeX users have been eagerly adopting the fonts, for some time, using XeTeX and LuaTeX.
While TeX users were investigating the use of these text fonts,
ISO was extending Unicode to provide a means of expressing
mathematics. As this work proceeded, Microsoft and (separately) a
consortium of publishing companies were developing OpenType maths
fonts (Microsoft contributed on the development of the concepts,
within the ISO process). MicroSoft's OpenType Maths font,
Cambria Math (article en anglais plus détaillé)
has been available for purchase for some time.
The first free OpenType Maths font to appear was
Asana Math, which was eventually followed by
the publishers' consortium's offer of an interim version
of their font, STIX, which has been
redeveloped to provide a more usable whole, XITS,
by a group of TeX users.
Other fonts are appearing, including
TeX Gyre Termes Math
(based on Times-like fonts) and Tex Gyre Pagella Math (based on Palatino-like fonts),
and LM Math extending
the OpenType version of the Latin Modern font family.
Actually using a unicode maths font is quite a complicated business, but the LaTeX package unicode-math (supported by the fontspec package) does the essential groundwork.
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