Re: UTF8 and (La)TeX backend?

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

address@hidden writes:
> 
> > > how do you think we should handle encoding for the TeX backend?  I
> > > am tempted to just dump
> > >
> > >   \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
> > >
> > > [...]
> > >
> > > we still need to do something with encoding, to
> > >
> > > 1. dump the appropriate \usepackage headings
> > >
> > > 2. select a reasonable guesstimate for the initial rendering run
> > >    used by -f texstr
> >
> > In addition, it would be nice if normal (i.e. utf8 encoded) input
> > files keep working and produce similar results, both in -f tex and
> > -f ps.
> 
> I believe that `-f tex' and `-f ps' are fundamentally different, and
> that we shouldn't invest time to `unify' both interfaces.  We have

I disagree. We want both to look equal or as similar as possible. For
example, we can have people develop a score using GNOME point and
click, then print samples using PS output, and do final touchup on the
SVG output.

Of course, we can decide that TeX is the odd one out, but then we have
to figure out a way to make lilypond-book use the -f ps backend
(because we want the manual to use the preferred backend, of course).
We could do so by dumping systems as separate EPS files, and dumping a
.tex file saying

  \includegraphics{system1.eps}
  \includegraphics{system2.eps}
  \includegraphics{system3.eps}
  \includegraphics{system4.eps}

the last actually has my preference, since I am not a fan of the tex
backend. How do we prevent bigcheese20.otf from ending up hundreds of
times in the output?

> different fonts, different encodings, different font attributes, etc.
> As discussed before, lilypond should pass the text strings for the TeX
> backend unmodified to TeX.
> 
> It probably makes sense to pronounce the differences between `-f tex'
> and `-f ps' w.r.t. font handling even more -- what about renaming the
> TeX font attributes to `tex-font-...'?

I don't think this is an improvement.

* LilyPond needs to determine a font both in TeX and PS.
* LilyPond needs to load those metrics to get a rough estimate of
  sizes.

I don't see the plus point of having two separate mechanisms in
place. 

-- 

 Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   address@hidden   |   http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen