Consider supporting Noto Sans Math in MathJax 4

[allefeld]

I've seen that MathJax 4 includes support for Fira Math, which is great! I think sans-serif math is important for the web, because the web is predominantly in sans-serif fonts, and serif math stands out weirdly from that.

A suggestion: Consider also supporting Noto (Sans) Math. Noto is deservedly one of the most popular fonts on the web today (e.g. as a Linux user I see GitHub in Noto). Moreover, like the other Noto fonts, Math is available as a webfont from Google Fonts. Since about a year ago, it also has an OpenType MATH table which I assume would provide the metrics needed by MathJax?

[dpvc]

Thanks for the suggestion. That looks like a good font to include. It gave me the incentive to look to see what math fonts are available, and there are 10 or so new ones since I did the initial v4 font collection, so there are definitely more to include, several of the sans-serif fonts.

Even with the font tools (not yet publicly available), it takes some time (several days) to get all the data worked out for a new font, and so this will probably have to wait a bit before it is done. That may be after the initial 4.0 release (as fonts can be added any time, as they are not part of the core MathJax releases).

Once the font tools are released, I expect that third parties will be making other fonts available as well.

[dgleich]

If you are looking for people to test the font tools, I'm happy to volunteer. I'd love to get MinionPro working (for myself) and would be happy to write up detailed notes on what all I had to do. I'm also happy to work on something that would benefit the community (e.g. Noto Sans)

[dpvc]

@dgleich, thanks for your kind offer. We are not quite at the point where the tools can be used by others, and they are still a bit in flux as we work out some details with how font extensions work in MathJax. Once v4.0 is out, the font tools are one of the first things I'd like to make available. When we are a little closer to making them public, we would be happy to have you help with testing, building some new fonts, and drafting some documentation. Thanks for the offer! We will keep you in the loop when we are able to make versions of the tools available. They're just a little too rough right now.