Re: Century Schoolbook not italic

[Alexander Kobel]

Hi Joram,

I'm not an expert in the topic, but I hope I can still shed some light 
on the issue. AFAIU this depends on how the font is shipped, and I am 
not aware of a proper fallback solution that will work in all cases.
If the designer ships all fonts of a family (probably in a single .otf 
or .ttf file) with the same font basename, the first approach will work: 
It is really /one/ font in several shapes/variants. However, if she 
ships each style with a different name (postfixed by, e.g., "Italic" or 
"Bold" or "SmallCaps"), you have to resort to the second option.

I assume there are technical reasons to do the latter approach instead 
of font collections; e.g., IIRC Type1 fonts in the traditional format 
can only contain a single font style per file. Also, separate files can 
help to make name clashes more visible: if you have a single font style 
and at some point upgrade to the entire family, you won't have two 
versions of the regular one coexisting silently. Finally, I'm not sure 
if there are specifications for all common style variants in all 
supported container formats.

There are some fonts available in both variants, that is both in 
collections and in separate files. I'm not aware of a method to specify 
fallbacks in LilyPond, short from re-inventing the font selection 
through Scheme.
IIUC, the clean way is to always use your first approach and provide 
FontConfig config files which translate between this representation and 
the "internal" naming. The second part should usually be done by the 
font provider, or your Linux distribution. No clue about the situation 
on Windows... I'm not sure how applications like OpenOffice deal 
ambiguities, in particular since OO allows fake bold, italics or small 
caps, but will choose "real" designs if existing. (I assume it's a 
rather simple heuristic.) More ambitious software (such as Scribus) does 
not pretend fancy faces if they are not explicitly designed and shipped; 
LilyPond follows this good tradition.


Best,
Alexander


On 01/06/2014 08:24 PM, Noeck wrote:
> Hi,
>
> why does this example code not work? I.e. why does it not print the clef
> modifier 8 in the italic version of the Century Schoolbook font?
>
> \version "2.18.0"
> \score {
>    { \clef "treble_8" a1^"8 is not italic" }
>    \layout {
>      \override Staff.ClefModifier.font-name = #"Century Schoolbook L"
>      \override Staff.ClefModifier.font-shape = #'italic
>    }
> }
>
> This works, but for other fonts the font-shape can be changed without
> changing the name.
>
> \score {
>    { \clef "treble_8" a1^"8 is italic" }
>    \layout {
>      \override Staff.ClefModifier.font-name = #"Century Schoolbook L italic"
>    }
> }
>
> TIA,
> Joram