Re: Use jazz fonts in LilyPond?

[Simon Albrecht]

On 07.03.2016 00:10, Eric Albert wrote:
> I like the look of the commercial product JazzFont (to view the complete character sets, click on 
> "KEYSTROKES" in the rightmost blue box on the second line of boxes in the top center of 
> the page, then click on "Jazzfont for Windows", which is down a bit on the right):
>
>    www.jazzfont.com
>
> I see that this font set has several subsets (pardon the wrong language), including one 
> ("JazzCord") that appears to map single character codes to things such as 
> "-7(b5)". Can this feature be uses with LilyPond?

Yes, but…
You can use the font in \markup {} environments (including lyrics) by 
directly accessing the glyphs or by entering the Unicode codepoints into 
your source file. However, LilyPond’s actual approach to chord notation 
is quite different: There is a \chordmode {} for input, which tries – 
like most things in LilyPond – to give a semantically appropriate 
rendition of the content, i.e. of the individual constituents of a chord 
symbol. The engraving is then assembled from its elements. This has 
great advantages, e.g. you can easily transpose chords, customise the 
looks or use the same input for both notes and chords.
So the idea of having one character for an entire chord symbol, as you 
wrote, is quite alien to a ‘LilyPondish way of thinking’.

HTH, Simon