Re: LyricText #'font-series = #'bold-narrow ?!

[Valentin Villenave]

Hi Alexander,

CC-ing to the bug list just in case.

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 2:39 PM, Alexander Kobel <address@hidden> wrote:
> why does LyricText #'font-series default to #'bold-narrow?
>
> First, it's counterintuitive to me to have a bold narrow font as the most
> important thing to read in a piece; it's just too black-ish. Condensed seems
> fine for lyrics, but bold?
> Second, it's defined for nearly no font, in particular Century Schoolbook L
> (the default of LilyPond) does not have it, IIUC, so regular is used
> instead.  At least, this holds for the free typeface; according to
> Wikipedia, there are Century designs featuring a narrow variant, but AFAICS
> all are commercial, and don't necessarily come as Century /Schoolbooks/.
> Third, even /if/ it were defined, it doesn't seem to work: I tried "Nimbus
> Sans L", the only font I could find right now which actually offers a bold
> condensed variant (with the same basename, i.e. [1]), and it falls back to
> regular even there.  Which came to no surprise after I saw
>
> # git grep bold-narrow
> Documentation/misc/ChangeLog-2.1: * scm/font.scm (paper20-font-vector): add
> bold-narrow series (only
> Documentation/misc/ChangeLog-2.1: * scm/define-grobs.scm
> (all-grob-descriptions): use bold-narrow
> scm/define-grob-properties.scm:   include @code{medium}, @code{bold},
> @code{bold-narrow}, etc.")
> scm/define-grobs.scm:             (font-series . bold-narrow)
>
> Is this symbol actually defined somewhere, and what am I missing?
>
>
> [1] This observation makes me wonder: is it possible to define different
> font basenames for several series of, say, the serif default font?  Some of
> my favourite fonts come in two flavours for normal spacing and condensed
> spacing, and my workaround - if I need both - is to define the condensed one
> as the monospace font to have easy access on it.  Which works, but is a
> complete abuse of the monospace entry.  The Real Thing would be to say
> "GarmdITC Bk BT" is my default serif font, with default proportions,
> "GarmdITC BkCn BT" is the corresponding condensed font. Some typefaces even
> need the same for bold, ultra-bold or something like this (e.g. Arial vs.
> Arial Black).  And when 'font-series is switched, of course the appropriate
> basename should be chosen.