Re: Jazz Fonts

[Mats Bengtsson]

Quoting "David A. Greene" <address@hidden>:

> Recent convert to Lilypond - great work!
>
> I see that questions about jazz or "ink pen" fonts have come up several
> times over the years.  Responses seem to be one of the following forms:
>
> - Theoretically, Lily can use other fonts but getting it to work is "a
>   lot of effort."
>
> - These fonts are not free so we can't test them.
>
> The second point is addressed, I think, by some free jazz fonts that
> are out there.  I haven't looked at the specific licensing yet, but
> an alternative is of course to just design our own font.

If you read the essay about the philosophy behind LilyPond at
http://lilypond.org/web/about/automated-engraving/
you will realize that the main authors have put lot of effort on the 
font layout, so designing a new font at the same high
standard is a tough task.


> I'd like to understand the first point better.  What's involved in
> adding support for alternative fonts?  I may be able to do some work
> in this area, as I have need for producing scores with jazz fonts.
> What's the estimated learning curve for someone new to the codebase
> to dive in?  I have many years of coding experience, especially
> advanced C++.  Is there code documentation anywhere (doxygen, etc.)?

I don't really have the competence to answer here, but my guess is that 
the easiest solution is to package the jazz font into an OTF
file which uses exactly the same glyph names as the default font
in LilyPond.

The main alternative would be to modify all the functions in LilyPond
that lookup the glyph names for note heads, clefs, ... and unfortunately
I think that these functions are scattered over a number of source code
files implemented both in C++ and Scheme.

If you search the mailing list archives, you will find some pointers
to introductions to the program structure, among others a recent 
masters thesis by Erik Sandberg.


  /Mats