The STIX Font creation project states the mission…
… of the Scientific and Technical Information Exchange (STIX) font creation project is the preparation of a comprehensive set of fonts that serve the scientific and engineering community in the process from manuscript creation through final publication, both in electronic and print formats. Toward this purpose, the STIX fonts will be made available, under royalty-free license, to anyone, including publishers, software developers, scientists, students, and the general public.
They are currently in a beta phase and it looks good so far. It would be wonderful to increase the portability of documents across platforms and creation systems and although a common font representation is only a small part of the overall problem, it is a great start.
There are unicode encoded fonts and a few that have characters that have yet to receive a unicode assignment ( the example image shows characters from the non-unicode assigned glyphs ).
I’m looking forward to the (La)TeX beta phase too.
(Via slashdot.org).