Re: Aw: Re: Pseudo-handwritten font

[David Kastrup]

"Torsten Hämmerle" <address@hidden> writes:

> So finally: what have I done and why?  The main obstacle is the rigid
> way Lilypond handles its (her, his?)  internal music font. I
> deliberately decided to stick to an "ordinary" OTF/TTF font first to
> learn how to use external fonts (who knows what it's good for) and my
> metafont phase of life dates back to the last millennium.

I think what we want to arrive at is a way to drop in music fonts into
LilyPond in a tolerable workable way.  I think that we can't avoid at
first the necessity of having the font, if not its glyphs, at least its
metrics and letter names, tailored to LilyPond.  A second stage might
likely include putting a Scheme layer in between that can serve LilyPond
with the impression of a virtual font, but I think that a viable
starting point would likely be a font with a specific layout.

We currently have three music fonts of more than marginal interest:
LilyPond's own Feta (?), Gonville, and the Jazz font project.

The Jazz fonts serve a different purpose than Gonville: Gonville is
intended as a wholesale replacement of LilyPond's fonts, made with a
somewhat different set of design choices.  The Jazz fonts, in contrast,
are for a different style of use.  For this reason, Gonville inclusion
centered on the question "how do I get an installation where the default
LilyPond fonts have been replaced by Gonville?".

We can't do that with the Jazz fonts.  While there will be users who
don't use anything else, we will also have users who need both styles.

-- 
David Kastrup