Re: Mensural c clef - metafont design/philosophy question

[Werner LEMBERG]

> I'm playing with metafont to redesign the mensural c clef and see
> that most of the clefs are drawn by creating a pattern of the
> desired shape and then filling it.  An alternative would be to
> select a pen and draw the shape by connecting the vertices.

Please call

  FONTFORGE=foo mf2pt1 --rounding=0.0001 <lilypond-font.mf>

(yes, you should really use `foo' so that FONTFORGE points to a
nonexistent program) and inspect the raw outlines with FontForge.
This probably demonstrates best how to design glyphs which can be
reliably converted with mf2pt1.

> Is there any objection about using this as a method, or is it just
> an alternative that's perfectly OK?

It really depends.  If you have rounded corners, there is no
alternative to describing the outline explicitly.  Note that
Metafont/Metapost pens are always polygons, thus many path operators
like `..' produce bad translations to PS outlines.


    Werner