Bug 167728 – Poor MathML rendering on macOS Sierra with the system font

• Status: NEW
• Component: MathML

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

Created attachment 300396 [details]
Screenshot of Mozilla's MathML Torture Test (STIXGeneral VS STIX Two)

By default macOS Sierra 10.12.3 only ships the obsolete STIXGeneral fonts, which are not enough to get decent mathematical rendering. On the other hand, STIX 2 was released in December 2016 and greatly improves the rendering when it is installed. See the attached screenshots comparing the two versions of STIX on Safari 10 (left: STIXGeneral, right: STIX Two):

- some vertical fences do no stretch to the desired size
- integrals and summation symbols are too small
- some scripts are wrongly placed
- vertical spacing in nested roots is too narrow
- probably more... See https://trac.webkit.org/wiki/MathML/Fonts for details.

From the STIX Two release notes (https://sourceforge.net/projects/stixfonts/files/Current%20Release/STIXv2.0.0.zip/download):

"Earlier versions of the STIX fonts are deprecated and no longer supported. We urge all users of the STIX fonts to upgrade to the new versions as soon as possible."

From Jacques Distler blog (https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/blog/archives/002926.html):

"The STIX Two fonts were released this week. They represent a big improvement on Version 1, and are finally definitively better than LatinModern for displaying MathML on the web. [...] In an ideal world, OS vendors would bundle the STIX Two fonts with their next release (as Apple previously bundled the STIX fonts with MacOSX ≥10.7)"

[Radar WebKit Bug Importer]

<rdar://problem/30339514>

[Frédéric Wang (:fredw)]

I just checked on macOS 10.13.3 (February 19, 2018) and the only pre-installed math fonts are the obsolete STIXGeneral.