Arbitrary TeX in lilypond - suggestion

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

address@hidden writes:
> Hi,
> 
> Firstly, I'm very sorry for my arrogant and uninformed
> criticism on this list several years ago.

Hi!

apologies accepted; nice to see you back.

> There are many instances where you might want arbitrary TeX
> or LaTeX, especially in the lyrics.  For example, I want to
> put Chinese characters in the lyrics, and also PinYin (a
> method of romanising Chinese that requires unusual ways of
> typesetting accents).

Pinyin can be done with a few TeX commands. Lily is smart enough to
understand that \longCommand doesn't take that much space. For chinese
you probably can get away with assuming fixed sizes for every
character.

Using LaTeX is something that could be done, but would surely not be
accepted by me as patch: it's bad engineering to use such an
complicated external program to discover something simple such as a
font metric.

If you'd like to get such stuff into lily, you would have to make
Unicode font-metric lookup, and decode UTF-8 encoded strings in
Lily. At the backend have to figure out how to output glyphs from a
16-bit font.

--
Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   address@hidden    | http://www.cs.uu.nl/~hanwen/