OpenType support in Windows

[Aleksandr Andreev]

Hello List,

In Ubuntu, LilyPond has support of the default OpenType features (that
is, those features that are on by default: ccmp (Glyph Composition),
liga (Ligatures), kern (Kerning), mark (Mark to base positioning) and
mkmk (Mark to mark positioning)). My understanding is that there is
presently no way to access other features that can be turned on and
off (stylistic sets, small caps, old style figures, etc), which is
what this issue is about IIUC:
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=1388

I recently tested LilyPond on Windows 8 (Enterprise Development Test
version running on VirtualBox). It appears that LilyPond does not
support any OpenType features on Windows 8 (at least as of version
2.16.2).

The results I obtain using the Hirmos Ponomar font from here:
http://www.ponomar.net/cu_support.html
are attached.

What we see is that there is no support for Variation sequences
(ccmp), Mark positioning (mark), or Contextual substitution (ccmp),
all features that should work by default and are necessary for
typesetting text in many complex writing systems. Compare the same
output to Ubuntu (second attachment). This is not a font issue, as the
font has been tested and works under Windows 8 in other software -- MS
Word and MSIE.

Question: is it a known defect that LilyPond does not support OpenType
features in Windows? If this is true, then this appears to be
unrelated to issue 1388, where we simply need an interface to access
optional OpenType features. What is causing support of OpenType
features to fail in Windows even though it works in Ubuntu -- is it
the fault of LilyPond, Ghostscript, Uniscribe, or something else?

On a somewhat related note, what would be required to add support of
SIL Graphite to LilyPond? Graphite fonts are supported by LibreOffice,
both in Linux and Windows.

Best,

Aleksandr

test_windows.png
Description: PNG image

test_ubuntu.png
Description: PNG image