Insert Font Joke Here

If you have written any kind of crystallography-related manuscript or report, you’ve probably run into one of the most annoying problems I’ve encountered in my academic career—the lack of a proper overline character. You see, instead of writing “-3”, crystallographers change the negative sign into a line on top of the 3 and call it “bar 3”. Unfortunately, there is no font that does this. Some font sets have a “combining overline” (U+0305) which you place between two characters and draws a bar over both characters, as in “4̅3”. In some font sets, this character extends over both letters, and in other font sets, it is centered over the first letter but extends towards the second letter. But I haven’t found a font yet that can just place an overline over a single character (yes, there are macron characters, but they don’t cover the entire letter).

However, just recently a bunch of scientific publishers have released a comprehensive, royalty-free font set for scientists called STIX. It is supposed to contain every character required by any scientific discipline. The STIX font set now has a proper combining overline character, so now I can write that the space group of bornite properly as F̅43m instead of F-43m. One quick note, the STIX fonts are in beta testing right now, but you can download them from the STIX website once you sign up. Also, the STIX combining overline must be inserted before the letter or number you want the bar over.