Re: Roman numerals in figured bass; also, TEXMF and TEXMFCNF behavior

[Mats Bengtsson]

Tommaso Toffoli wrote:
>  Lilypond is wonderful, and its "body plan" is just right. Thanks.
> I have two questions.
>
> 1. Lilypond has limited support for figured bass in the traditional
> form of columns of digits indicating intervals relative to the bass note.
> Today, for both pedagogical and practical reasons, it is common
> to esplicitly give, besides those numbers, a Roman numeral
> (sometimes in upper or lower case for, resepctively, major and minor)
> indicating the chord root, such as
>
>                  7       6
> I       V       V       V4
>
> This kind of figured bass, appearing below the staff, is distinct from the so
> called "chord notation" such as
>
> Fdim    F7      Cmin
>
> etc. Is there a way in lilypond to notate these Roman
> numerals in the  figured bass?

There is no direct support for it today. As a workaround, you could
typeset them using text scripts (I used to do that also for the
normal bass figures before we got the explicit support for them).
An alternative if you want vertical alignment is to typeset them
as a line of lyrics.

> 2. I use the kpathsea method of organizing TeX fonts. Specifically, beside the
> system texmf tree in /usr/share I use a standard-structure texmf tree for the
> user, called ~/.texmf, where I store user-defined fonts.
>
> When I installed lilypond I couldn't get its fonts to appear until I ran the
> lilypond.sh script in /etc/profile.d. After that lilypond worked right,
> but my user fonts had become unaccessible. To get them back,
> I had to do some searching. I finally changed the lilypond-generated export
>
>   echo $TEMF
>  
> {/usr/share/lilypond/1.6.6,{!!/home/tt/texmf,!!/usr/local/share/texmf,!!/usr/share/texmf}}
>
>  to
>
>   echo $TEXMF
>   
> {/usr/share/lilypond/1.6.6,{!!/home/tt/.texmf,!!/usr/local/share/texmf,!!/usr/share/texmf}}
>
>  (note the change /home/tt/texmf --> /home/tt/.texmf). I do not understand
> this TEXMF story and its stepping over TEXMFCNF. (By the way, when is the
> script lilypond.sh automatically executed if I leave it in /etc/profile.d?)
>
> Do you have any suggestions how to do this right, and can you give the
> installer a few more words of explanations? I'm afraid many potential
> users may be turned off by this first difficulty and never come back.

This looks really weird. I assume you have added the user texmf tree in
the texmf.cnf file. The trick we do in lilypond.sh is to ask kpathsea
about the current value of $TEXMF when we add the Lilypond texmf tree
to the list. This is done using the command kpsexpand, which will work
both if the variable already is set as an environment variable or if
it is set in the texmf.cnf file. I can't understand how the extra dot
can disappear. I tried to reproduce the problem but didn't manage.
What does the following command return?
kpsexpand "\\$TEXMF"
(try it in a shell where you first have unset the variable, so we
see the same thing as lilypond.sh does).

The scripts in /etc/profile.d/ are sourced every time you start a new
shell.

Regarding your worry about troubles for new users, I have to admit I
have never seen this very problem before.

    /Mats