STIX Two Text

A physics journal has a problem most publishers do not: the same page carries running text, Greek letters, phonetic symbols and a wall of mathematics, and if the text face and the math face come from different families the seams show. STIX exists to remove those seams. The Scientific and Technical Information eXchange project was started by a group of publishers known as the STI Pub companies, the American Mathematical Society, the American Institute of Physics, the American Physical Society, the American Chemical Society, the IEEE and Elsevier, who wanted 1 set of fonts that could run through the whole production process, from an author’s draft to the printed article.

STIX Two Text is the text half of the second generation. Ross Mills, John Hudson and Paul Hanslow at Tiro Typeworks did the drawing, building on earlier work by MicroPress and Coen Hoffman, and a matching STIX Two Math font is kept in the project’s repository.

So what is in the text face? Regular, Medium, Semi Bold and Bold, each with an italic, which makes 8 styles. Latin with Vietnamese, Greek and Cyrillic are covered, and the set runs into the IPA letters a linguist needs (ɐ, ɑ, ɒ, ɓ and the rest). There are true small caps, old style and proportional figures, superscripts and subscripts and fractions.

The face itself is sober and a little narrow, and to our eye it stays out of the way over long pages. We would pick Regular for body and keep Semi Bold for section heads; the Bold is heavy enough to fight with displayed equations.