Re: SMuFL

[David Kastrup]

Andrew Bernard <address@hidden> writes:

> This is of great interest to me because several of the people I do
> scores for (contemporary composers) do not favour the very heavy black
> Germanic look of the standard lilypond font, attractive though it may
> be. It would be nice to have a wider choice to offer in the future,
> and if SMuFL takes off as a standard, there may well be many fonts to
> choose from.

Do you really think that proprietary music system vendors will release
their fonts in a usable form under free licenses so that people can
forego buying their software and use LilyPond instead?

Think again.  What's in it for them?  The LilyPond fonts.

Basically they are saying "if you do all the work to convert the
LilyPond fonts to the layout and metrics that our software happens to
use, then in return thank you very much."

So far I see it mostly as a way to increase their market value.  If you
buy their software and fonts in order to be able to use their software
with LilyPond's fonts, they get money for fonts people don't want to
use.  If you buy their software and fonts in order to be able to use
their fonts with LilyPond's software, they get money for software people
don't want to use.

Of course, it's not just LilyPond that is in the game here: all of the
commercial vendors win if the preferred setup of customers requires
buying three different complete music software suites from different
vendors, utilizing only a third of each.

But if we are focusing on our core mission to provide _free_ software,
what do we get in return for our cooperation?  Puzzling problems and bug
reports for setups which are only half under our own control.

-- 
David Kastrup