MathML font changes from STIX to Asana and MathJax

Even before the Macintosh allowed rudimentary font design in 1986, I have had a fascination with fonts. I remember the interchangeable typing heads on the IBM Selectric typewriters - and discovering that there were other type heads.I made a conscious decision in the late 1980s to use Palatino in my master's thesis because I thought the font looked better than Times in print.

I went from Arial to Verdana to Tahoma and then on to Trebuchet MS on the Windows side of the world. I liked the new "C" fonts that Vista brought to the desk top, especially Calibri and Candara.  I was excited to see the @font-face rule gain support in CSS. I left Calibri for Ubuntu (the font) when 10.10 rolled that out.

I remain conscious of font choices and font stacks in CSS. As one who uses MathML, I had added in the STIX font in support of MathML. I was late to learn of the shift in FireFox 13 to Asana and MathJax fonts for MathML in FireFox, critically useful information for me as I generate class materials using MathML.Size tweaks I had been deploying for MathML do not appear to be necessary using Asana Math and the MathJax fonts. Another refactoring of CSS beckons, but allowing the browser to select the optimal fonts for MathML appears to currently be the most practical solution. Forcing the use of other fonts and tweaking sizes appears to lead to problems in stretchy characters. Maybe Asana Math will be the new font for my on line.

Note that MathJax, and possibly STIX, may eventually be deprecated in favor of math table extensions to existing fonts.

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