Re: SMuFL

[Carl Peterson]

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 5:46 AM, David Kastrup <address@hidden> wrote:

Andrew Bernard <address@hidden> writes:

> On 10/08/13 7:10 PM, David Kastrup wrote:
>

>> Of course, people are free to do whatever they want with their own time
>> and efforts.  But if you do it out of a feeling of contributing to
>> LilyPond, it may be worth looking quite closer before investing a lot of
>> effort.  You might also be disappointed in the lack of uptake by the
>> LilyPond websites, manuals and other resources for proprietary font
>> support.
> But as Urs points out, LaTex and so on do not have this problem.

I recommend you reread what Urs write: TeXlive does not distribute
support files for non-free fonts.  Now it is not really because it would
be a problem, but rather because it does not help the project, and you
can't test that kind of stuff anyway without acquiring proprietary
software.

 

There is the fontspec package, primarily used with XeLaTeX, the purpose of which is to allow one to use any font in a LaTeX document, including proprietary fonts (whether you call the ability to use proprietary fonts intentional or incidental is likely one of those dreaded semantic distinctions).

I think we're getting hung up on the fact that SMuFL is being promulgated by a corporate entity and the only implementation of SMuFL is produced by that corporate entity (and that most of the musical font work is being done by other corporate entities releasing them under proprietary licenses). Having a standard and being interoperable with that standard makes it easier for *any* font designer to build fonts for LilyPond and for any software package to use LilyPond fonts, whether the font or program happens to be open source or proprietary.

I have a question. Does LilyPond currently have a set of documented standards to tell prospective font designers *explicitly* (1) how to set up their fonts for them to be referenced by LilyPond (glyph names), and (2) the metrics necessary to make their fonts work with LilyPond? One of the barriers I see to a lot of extensibility in this area is that even though LilyPond is open source, it is not exactly clear (and maybe I'm just not looking in the right place) what one is to do to build on to it. I was digging into the notehead file to fix an issue with some of the shaped noteheads and on a couple of the things I was looking at, it was very much a "guess and check and hope nothing breaks."

I realize that the default answer to my question (if no such documentation exists) is, "Well, if it matters that much to you, get your hands dirty and do something about it." And you're probably right, but someone not already familiar with how the fonts work writing documentation to how the fonts work sounds a bit, well, counterintuitive.