Re: medieval font design

[Juergen Reuter]

On Sat, 3 Feb 2007, Till Rettig wrote:

> Juergen Reuter wrote:
> > Hi, Till!
> >
> > My personal experience is that you have to fine tune the glyphs anyway; 
> > hence, determining just a few coordinates should suffice (this can be 
> > easily done manually if you have a really big printout of the scan).
> Do you mean by using xfig or inkscape or by defining the metafont source 
> directly?

Of course, you can use xfig to create some self-contained mf source code 
(though I never tried).  However, note that lilypond glyphs typically 
refer to predefined values such as notespace or staff_space of 
stafflinethickness and should call lily-specific macros such as 
fet_begingroup or set_char_box rather than the corresponding native mf 
equivalents.  That is, you would have to rewrite most parts of the 
xfig generated mf code anyway.  You will get off probably better if you 
use some existing glyph as a template, duplicate and modify it.

> > However, as far as I know, stems are currently drawn dynamically by just 
> > creating rectangles on the fly, rather than outputting a fixed glyph.  The 
> > reason for doing so is that the actual stem length in general depends on a 
> > lot of other things, and therefore there is no fixed stem glyph. 
> Oh, this sounds logicalt, but I think for the ancient notation there is no 
> need to have different lenghts -- well, lets put it that way: in petrucci 
> prints there *is* no different length, and in manuscripts naturally there is 
> one.

True, but there is currently no infrastructure for typesetting stem 
glyphs.  So either you would have to provide this infrastructure in 
lily/stem.cc (could turn out to be tedious).  Or, probably much easier, 
you compute the polygon on the fly (provided that the calculation of the 
polygon's points is not too complex).

> But it doesn't seem to differ that much as in modern notation mainly due 
> to the fact that there are no beams.

Not only.  Stems may also be shortened to avoid colissions; notes on 
ledger lines may have shorter stems for aesthetical reasons; and I think 
there are a couple of other reasons.

Greetings,
Juergen