RE: Kievan square notation in LilyPond

[James Lowe]

Carl et al,
________________________________________
From: address@hidden address@hidden on behalf of Carl Sorensen address@hidden
Sent: 17 June 2011 02:05
To: Aleksandr Andreev
Cc: address@hidden
Subject: Re: Kievan square notation in LilyPond

On 6/16/11 6:02 PM, "Aleksandr Andreev" <address@hidden> wrote:

>>> Replacing the feta font is doable, but not trivial.
>
> Is there anywhere I can read about how the Feta font is set up? The
> font I have is part of our proposal to encode the Kievan glyphs in
> Unicode, so it would need to be converted to the format that Feta
> uses. Is there a detailed description of this format somewhere?

Not really.

The Feta font is created from metafont sources, which are found in the mf/
directory of lilypond.  New glyphs can be added in the files whose names
have no font size embedded, like feta-noteheads.mf.  New classes of glyphs
can be added by adding new files, like feta-kievan.mf.  This is a relatively
straightforward process.

The font files are created from the .mf files by mf2pt1 and fontforge, IIUC.

The Feta font uses code points that are not available for standard Unicode
assignment,so LilyPond doesn't use standard code points.   Instead, LilyPond
uses glyph names to access the glyphs.  The unicode code points for glyphs
can change between builds.

The simplest way to get glyphs into Feta is to write metafont code for the
glyphs and add that code to the files in the mf/ directory.

I have not looked carefully at how the gonville font is substituted for the
the Feta font.

-----

It's crude (but effective), you either sym link the font dirs to point to the 
Gonville stuff (which is supplied via a zip/tgz file that you extract in situ) 
or as in the case of windows and mac you rename the old font dir and move the 
goneville one in its place.

So you cannot make Gonville and Feta co-exist and simply pick the font name in 
any way. It's an all or nothing, which means also that Gonville doesn't contain 
all the glyphs that LP/Feta does like the ones used for Ancient Music so you 
lose that if you use Gonville. It might be quicker in the short term to use 
that approach - see http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/gonville/ for 
more detail.

James