Re: [somewhat-OT] tweaking Lilypond PS/PDF output in (e.g.) Illustrator

[Trevor Bača]

On 8/30/06, fiëé visuëlle <address@hidden> wrote:
> Am 2006-08-30 um 20:52 schrieb Trevor Bača:
> > Question: do you have all the lily fonts installed under OS X (which I
> > seem to remember is the os you're using, right?) such that you have an
> > "Emmentaler" and "Feta" menu under Type > Fonts in InDesign and
> > Illustrator?
>
> I've only Century Schoolbook installed, because I use it for
> additional lyrics when working with LilyPond scores. (That's easier
> than convincing LilyPond to use some other font for every piece of
> text.)
> I never tried to open Lily's PDFs with Illustrator (why should I, I
> do that only if I need to change texts or the like, if some customer
> delivered a PDF but wants corrections - I can't afford PitStop), so I
> didn't install the cheese fonts.

I think I'm finally able to answer the question I raised earlier in
the week about embedding lily-generated PDFs in InDesign.

The short answer is that embedding lily-generated PDFs in InDesign
works completely fine.

If you want to take lily's PDF output and put it in InDesign, just
open a new document in InDesign and select File > Place. There's no
need to worry about rendering your lilypond output as EPS (because
InDesign is happy with the PDFs) or to worry about telling lily
explicitly to embed fonts in the PDF (because lily embeds the fonts in
the PDFs by default anyway).

There's also no reason to worry about installing the lilypond fonts
under OS X (or probably under any of the other OSes) if all you're
doing is placing a PDF (with embedded fonts) in your InDesign doc
(because that's the purpose of the font-embedding, after all: to
prevent having to go through the font install on your own system).

[Sidenote, however, that if you ever do want to install the lilypond
fonts under OS X for some other purpose that it's somewhat difficult
to do and involves stuff like using FontForge to make OTFs out of the
Feta AFMs. I've done this last step and now have an archive of the
OTFs, so if anybody needs them, let me know.]

So basically lily PDFs in InDesign work fine outta the box.

UNLESS you happen to generate landscape tabloid pdfs and place them in
InDesign 3.0 or 3.0.1 (InDesign CS or "Creative Suite") under OS X
(both Intel AND PPC).

This is a really weird point because I can duplicate this problem
absolutley every single time I try it, on files ranging from simple to
complex (and on both a PPC iBook and an Intel iMac). But, working with
Henning, we're not able to duplicate the problem on another system. So
it's quite possible that there's something in my PDF settings that I'm
unaware of.

In any case, upgrading to InDesign 4.0 or greater (CS2 or "Creative
Suite 2")  fixed the problem for me.

Since this particular problem was a pain to track down, I thought I'd
pass along the experience and maybe save somebody else the drama of
having to repeat it.

Much thanks to Henning for checking some of PDFs on an external
system; without the extra pair of eyes I think the solution would have
taken *much* longer ...


--
Trevor Bača
address@hidden
... like the dew, or like lightning ...