As you know, chord names would not print for me in the default Verdana
font. I had wondered if the font was corrupt and needed replacing, but
Apple's Font Book app verified the copies of Verdana on my laptop as
clean. I also found that Verdana did not cause problems in any other app
on my laptop, either Apple-native or those in my X11 setup (OpenOffice,
gimp, etc.). So I concluded at that point that the font was okay and
started looking for other answers.
Eventually I went looking on the Ghostscript bug tracker and the GS
forums. There were several entries that mentioned font-related issues
with ps2pdf, but nothing that gave me a definite direction to follow.
Then I decided, as one last attempt to solve the problem, I would try
sourcing a copy of Verdana from somewhere new (the web, of course), on
the assumption that perhaps there was some subtle corruption that only
LP's version of Ghostscript was choking on. And wonder of wonders, the
problem vanished.
Okay, I thought, it was some odd corruption after all.
Then I got an email from one John H. McCoy, a university professor from
Texas. He had found my emails to bug-lilypond through Google, but had
been unsuccessful in posting to bug-lilypond himself, so he decided to
contact me directly. He was experiencing the same problem, only in
John's case he was using LP on a linux distro called ZenWalk (a
slackware variant, apparently), the problem arose when he upgraded
ZenWalk from version 4.2 to 4.4, and the problem font in this case was
DejaVuSans.
I told John about my experience, and he did some experimenting on his
setup. What he discovered was this:
"I found out that the DejaVu fonts are a work in progress. Supposedly
they are an enhancement of the Bitstream Vera font with additional hints
or, some such, so that they render better at small sizes ... Anyway ZW
linux 4.2 had DejaVu 2.11 installed whereas ZW 4.4 has 2.15. I have GS
8.15 installed in both versions of ZW and either version of the DejaVu
fonts works with it. Apparently only the 2.11 version of DejaVu is
compatable with the 8.46 version of gs embedded in lilypond."
This reminded me of something else. I had been able to open the PS files
from LP with KGhostscript and KPDF and convert them to PDF successfully
when the problem first arose. But just before I started searching the
Ghostscript forums, I had attempted to use KGhostscript with a
particular PS file, only to have it fail. Because I was in a rush I just
went back into LP, changed the chord name font-family to Roman, printed
and didn't think any more about it. Looking back, I remembered that I
had performed an update-all in Fink - I found that GS had moved from
version 8.51 to 8.54. So 8.51 didn't have a problem with the Verdana
font, but 8.54 did.
So I did a bit more checking - I retrieved a copy of the Verdana font
from a colleague and tested it - ps2pdf promptly failed. Put back the
copy of Verdana I downloaded from the web, and all is well again. The
difference? The copy that fails is version 2.45, the one that works is
version 2.35.
Sorry if relating all of this has been a bit tedious, but I'm telling
you about it because it's not clear to me whether this is something that
the LP developers should be concerned about or not. Clearly there's some
problems between recent versions of GS and recent versions of some
fonts. So I thought I would run this past you to judge whether this is
something the LP developers need to be aware of. Maybe it isn't - if so,
I apologise for wasting your time.
John also raised the question about whether a known-to-work version of
default fonts for text, chord names, etc., should also be bundled with
LP along with the fonts that are currently included - maybe he has a point?
Regards,
Brett Duncan
(Penal Colony inmate ;-) )