Re: stylized movement numbers

[Mark Polesky]

----- Original Message ----

From: Werner LEMBERG
Sent: Tuesday, September 23, 2008 3:25:23 AM

> Hmm.  Perhaps it would be sufficient to add proper kerning to the
> font.  Can you provide values for all combinations?  

I cannot, but if someone can, we'd all be indebted.

> IIRC, we don't have kerning yet for numbers.

For what I'm after, I'm afraid it'll be a little more than just that.
It would include kerning for number/letter combinations too. Take a
look at my mvt_numbers.ly file to see exactly what I'm doing. Part
of the problem is that I'm formatting each character in a given
string individually. I added a little left- and right- padding to
each number glyph and no padding to the letters (just noticed I 
left a residual "#:hspace 0" in there).

On the whole, the letters come out looking great (In the attached 
png, I've included an "fg" string to demonstrate some nice-looking 
letter-kerning). But the intersection between numbers and letters
is the hardest for me to control. For example, the "7b" looks great
but the "7." and the "7a" would look better with less space.

Now that I think about it, I think it's even trickier because the
numbers and letters are coming from 2 completely differentfonts
(I'm using the period from the same font as the letters).

Incidentally, part of the original problem arose when I asked
LilyPond to do this: \markup \number "7a." I know "a" and "." are
not numbers, but it looks like they are in a sans font at least
twice the height of the number.

It would be better for the non-number characters in a \number
string to default to a more proportionately-sized roman font. 

That would be a good start. The number kerning would be a nice
bonus. The number/letter kerning would be the icing on the cake.

Semantically, I think it's reasonable to consider letters in this 
context as part of a number, hence the impetus to write the 
function that I wrote.

So I guess I'd like to propose support for a construction like:
   \markup \number "7a."
with output that features kerned number/number, number/letter and 
letter/letter combinations using roman-style letters.

Maybe that's a lot to ask, but it's just a proposal. In the
meantime, my little \markup \No #"7a" trick will be an acceptable
substitute.

- Mark