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From: | Aaron Hill |
Subject: | Re: SMuFL Bravura |
Date: | Sun, 31 Mar 2019 18:49:38 -0700 |
User-agent: | Roundcube Webmail/1.3.8 |
On 2019-03-31 6:14 pm, edes wrote:
el 2019-04-01 a las 11:37 Andrew Bernard escribió:Thanks so much. Now to learn Metafont then. Shouldn't be too hardunlike valentin, i admire you already even if you don't succeed. i don'tknow what admire the most: the determination of the "now to learnmetafont", or the optimism of the "shouldn't be too hard". i'm sure all ofus are wishing you the best of luck.
I gave Metafont a casual, first glance a number of months ago. It did not seem that difficult, although I am sure it has its fair share of idiosyncrasies that I simply have not yet encountered.
One of Metafont's strengths as a tool is that each glyph is described programmatically. Consider when you want to have a font with a variety of weights. Rather than author each weight independently, Metafont lets you describe glyphs in general terms, where the target weight is simply an input parameter. This process is admittedly more abstract than just drawing the outline of each glyph by hand; but it certainly becomes much more productive in the long-run.
As folks might already know, Lilypond's font comes in specific versions for different target point sizes as to maintain a more consistent look and feel to the shapes. If you were to simply scale up or scale down a glyph, then details can become too rounded or too sharpened compared to other details. Here again is where Metafont helps. The general outline of a glyph is described in code where things like the size and shape of the virtual pen can be controlled parametrically.
I am not sure how complex the various articulations are that Andrew needs to add. Assuming there is an existing glyph that is close but needs some tweaking, it should be fairly straightforward to adapt current code to the new glyph.
-- Aaron Hill
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