Re: Font encoding

[Mats Bengtsson]

> address@hidden writes:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I've made a first attempt to implement the long awaited 
> > support for different font encodings. This means that you 
> > now can typeset Swedish, Danish, German, Spanish, ... 
> > in lyrics and text scripts including all special characters and
> > Lilypond will understand and calculate the correct size of each letter
> > when it determines the spacing. So far, the encodings OT1 (the default
> > in TeX) and T1 (Latin1) are supported.
> 
> IIRC both OT1 and T1 are TeX specific. Are they? We really want to
> move towards more modern standards.  Specifically, for the long term,
> usable direct PS output is on our wishlist. How does this work?

PS output works excellently if you:
- have Type1 versions of the European Computer Modern (EC) fonts
  installed (free versions have recently become available thanks
  to TeXtrace)
- have added the path to these fonts to GS_FONTPATH (this problem
  is the same also for the cmr fonts we have used so far).

The names T1 and OT1 are TeX specific, but that's just 
nomenclature.

> Shouldn't lilypond also read in .enc files?  Secondly, how much work
> would it be to add support for multibyte encodings? It would be nice
> to support chinese.

I don't know anything about .enc files, just noticed they
are used in X11. As soon as we add support for some kind
of lookup from input character encoding to the encoding
used in the font files (maybe .enc files are useful here)
the font handling mechanism in Lilypond shouldn't have 
any problems with multibyte encodings. However, I leave
a question mark for (1) the lexer/parser of Lilypond 
and (2) support in (La)TeX. 
One major difference between Lilypond and LaTeX is that
LaTeX can typset a single input character using multiple
glyphs.

> > - You have to set both the grob property font-encoding and 
> >   the paper variable fontenc if ly2dvi should handle the
> >   fonts correctly.
> 
> I don't understand why; how does LaTeX handle it when you mix fonts in
> different encodings? 

You can change it using the low-level command \fontencoding but
normally, you use the \selectlanguage command in babel or 
some other high level commands.

> >   Preferably, one of these should be set
> >   from the other. Maybe it would be best if the grob 
> >   property was set based on the paper variable, since it's
> >   a bad idea to mix different font encodings in the same
> >   file. I haven't investigated how this could be done. 
> >   Any suggestions?
> 
> you could import the default from the paper-block or style sheet, and
> supply that if no font-encoding is set.

OK, I'll take a look.

  /Mats