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

[Alexander Kobel]

Hi, folks,


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.


Cheers,
Alexander