Re: scaled lyrics

[Alexander Kobel]

On 2011-11-15 10:29, Jan-Peter Voigt wrote:
> Hello list,
>
> when I am typesetting christian/latin or german music, there are often
> passages with short notes and a lot of long syllables. The character 'M'
> is a quite long one and if you have the german word "schlem -- men", it
> also takes a lot of space. [...]
> But I don't like the look of the uneven scaled text. Has anyone an idea
> of a "softer" scaling function? Or has anyone another idea on this topic?
> [...]

Hi Jan-Peter,

this might sound silly, but why not switch the font? I often write 
syllabic German music, too, so I know your problem, and I often just use 
a condensed font family.

E.g., the free DejaVu font family offers condensed serif variants.
If you can, I also highly recommend that you get a cheap old version of 
the CorelDRAW suite (v6 or higher, I think, but just search the web to 
find out) on eBay or the like.
It comes with a collection of about a thousand font variants, including 
ones with proper condensed shapes. A good share of these fonts are of 
pretty good quality, though I heard that serious typographers would beat 
me up for saying so. They may not have excellent hinting or headline 
variants, but I find them very suitable for some lyrics.
You'll probably get TrueType and Type1 files without amazing features 
and huge character set, but it's really okay. Later versions (>= v13 and 
the Corel X suites, I think) also ship with an OpenType collection, but 
I did not get my hands on these so far.


Best,
Alexander