Displaying mathematical and scientific symbols on Web pages - and elsewhere - has always been a challenge due to lack of font support. That's about to change.

The folks at six organizations -- the American Chemical Society (ACS), the American Institute of Physics (AIP), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the American Physical Society (APS), Elsevier Science, and the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) -- are working together to create the STIX font, short for Scientific and Technical Information Exchange.

STIX will be compatible with Unicode, giving users and software developers around the world yet another reason to adopt this character encoding. And best of all, the STIX font will be free; it should be complete sometime in 2003. Here's whey it stands currently:

Check out the site.