Re: a proper whiteout function

[Alexander Kobel]

On 04/29/2015 12:04 PM, Pierre Perol-Schneider wrote:
> Hi Kieren, Hi Carl,
>
> I don't think that a standard scaling will help in this case.
> Here's an illustration of what could happened :
>
> \markup {
>    \combine
>    \with-color #magenta
>    \scale #'(1.2 . 1.2)
>    \musicglyph #"clefs.G"
>    \musicglyph #"clefs.G"
> }
>
> Whatever glyph re-centering, you'll never get a proper whiteout.
> One has to define a specific scaling function that can "blows" the glyph
> in order to get a bold one.

Correct. You need an offset (effectively a white stroke around all 
boundary curves) of whatever is rendered, and I think this should not be 
done with Lilypond inspecting the shape, but rather something on the 
lower level. A minute of googling brought me to the following page, 
which nicely shows some difficulties, and illustrates why it requires 
significant effort:
  http://tavmjong.free.fr/blog/?p=1257
I know that boldsymbol or something similar in LaTeX uses (used?) a 
bunch of copies of the same symbol with a slight translation each time, 
but that's 1. conceptually ugly and 2. prone to break for really thin 
lines, so I would not recommend to go this route.

I guess there might be a way to encode such a thing in PostScript? But 
even if there is a simple shortcut, I don't whether it can be applied to 
arbitrary stencils...


Best,
Alexander