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What is the font family and the sizes used in Stackexchange Math content and headings?

I think it is a readable font. It would be nice if we use it also in web pages involving mathjax. If it is not free, is there a similar font family which is free to use on webpages?

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    And what about the sizes?
    – petrichor
    Nov 26, 2012 at 9:15

4 Answers 4

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+50

You have to look closer. The standard text on Mathematics SE is in Georgia (then Times New Roman), but the maths are rendered using special mathematics/science fonts (you can right-click on the maths to get help.)

MathJax uses the STIX font family if installed on the user's computer. It's very close to Georgia and Times New Roman, the traditional kind of typeface used in scholarly publications. The STIX font family is given out for free (OTF format) by a group of science&technology publishing companies, see http://www.stixfonts.org and MathJax's user help pages: http://www.mathjax.org/help/fonts/ Also, the STIX font family happens to be preinstalled in OS X 10.7.

If the STIX font is not installed, MathJax resorts to other suitable fonts depending on operating system and browser version, including web fonts. The MathJax documentation has more on these internals: http://docs.mathjax.org/en/latest/options/HTML-CSS.html What MathJax font configuration is used on Mathematics SE, you probably better ask in their Meta forum.

Here are two screenshots for comparison. The first one with the STIX font family, the second one after I deactivated STIX on my system. I believe it's a web font, but I'm not sure. (Safari in OS X 10.7, where the STIX font family is preinstalled):

Original question: https://math.stackexchange.com/questions/244937/whether-lim-x-to-infty-fx-0-when-improper-integral-is-convergent

screenshot with STIX font family

screenshot with other font

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  • This is great. I didn't know about STIX fonts. Thanks a lot.
    – petrichor
    Nov 26, 2012 at 18:16
  • Thanks for the heads-up on the font used by MathJax. To me, that's worth a [+50] bounty…
    – e-sushi
    Nov 10, 2013 at 20:30
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body { font-family:Georgia,"Times New Roman",Times,serif; }

textarea{ font-family:Consolas, Menlo, Monaco, Lucida Console, Liberation Mono, DejaVu Sans Mono, Bitstream Vera Sans Mono, Courier New, monospace, serif; }

And then a mix of Arial, Helvetica, Helvetica Neu, and other sans serif fonts are used for reputation numbers, tables, counts, etc.

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Title "Mathematics" – Hoefler Text Black Headings and content - Georgia, Times New Roman, Times

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To find the font family in the future, here are a couple methods assuming you're using Chrome browser:

  1. Chrome DevTools Option + Cmd + i on the mac or View > Developer > DevTools

Using the magnifying glass icon, click on whatever text you want to see the font-family for.

enter image description here

  1. Chrome What Font Extension can be a little faster if you aren't used to DevTools.

enter image description here

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