Re: External fonts on MacOS

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

Christian Ebert wrote:

> On a more serious side: the kerning w/o LaTeX font metrics is a
> catastrophy. As I wrote in another post I'd be much more
> interested to get the TeX-backend working with lilypond-book
> (because I mainly set texts and not much notes) and to be able to
> compile it myself (w/o another ghostscript installation etc.)
>
> I still think giving up the TeX-backend (quality) in favor of
> seemingly easier use is the wrong direction to take. Because what
> I like(d) about lilypond is that it aimed at quality as first
> priority and no foul compromises.

I think this is a flawed analysis. TeX might be good at some things, 
from a technical point of view it's complete nightmare.  The design with 
Pango is much more versatile, and while it's not perfect yet, it will be 
if only for the shere mass of Pango. It powers much of GTK, and with a 
wide audience comes a wide array of hackers.

If you want to use TeX, be my guest; there still is a TeX backend,

  lilypond -b tex  foo.ly

which uses TeX to get exact metrics. It might have bitrotted a bit, but 
if you're keen on using it, I trust that you will produce nice patches.

You will have to compile Lily by yourself, though.

--
 Han-Wen Nienhuys - address@hidden - http://www.xs4all.nl/~hanwen