Re: OpenType support in Windows

[David Kastrup]

Aleksandr Andreev <address@hidden> writes:

> 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).

We have issues
<URL:http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2657> and
<URL:http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2656>.  At one
point of time in the 2.16 release cycle, they were considered release
critical.  They only reason they have been downgraded is that nobody is
working on them and nobody has a clue _how_ to work on them, so there
was no point in stopping the release process for them when no solution
was going to appear magically.

If you think you can do better, this bug would be rather important to
solve.

> Question: is it a known defect that LilyPond does not support OpenType
> features in Windows?

Yes, at least some.  And "known" is not the same as "acceptable".

> 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?

Nobody seems to know.

-- 
David Kastrup