Re: Changing Text Fonts

[Werner LEMBERG]

>> The example below does not work
> 
> To my knowledge, Lilypond has difficulty — i.e., fails completely —
> with older Mac OS True Type (.ttf) fonts, and Baghdad is one of
> those [at least on my machine].

Being an old Mac OS TTF per se is not a problem.  A font must have a
Unicode cmap so that lilypond can use it – to be more precise,
FreeType must be able to synthesize a Unicode cmap.  The library does
this for easy cases like Mac Roman encoding, IIRC, but it doesn't
apply complicated encoding mappings.

In case of Baghdad.ttf (which I just downloaded from the internet),
the font is lying.  While it has a Unicode cmap, it is completely
wrong, mapping the Arabic characters to Latin code points.  Putting
the font into a place where fontconfig can find it, I get the attached
result while compiling the following

  \header {
     title = \markup {
      \override #'(font-name . "Baghdad")
      "This my Masterpiece"
    }
  }

  { c'' }

>> Attached is a picture of the Font Book application on my Mac.  How
>> do I know the exact name of the font-name that should be used in
>> the ly file?  Could this differ from what I see in the FontBook?
> 
> The name in the “Full Name” field of FontBook is, I believe, the one
> you should use.

In case of doubt, call

  lilypond -dshow-available-fonts 2>&1 | less

on the command line and search for the font file.  For example, on my
GNU/Linux box, I get

  family Baghdad
   Baghdad:style=Regular

If you want more precise information, try

  fc-list | less

This time, I get

  /home/wl/.fonts/Baghdad.ttf: Baghdad:style=Regular

BTW, the above output also shows the directories searched by
fontconfig.

>> Also, I usually like to increase the kerning of the Title.  Is this
>> possible?
> 
> I don’t believe so.

You probably don't mean kerning but the spacing between the glyphs in
a title, right?  You can manually insert small horizontal whitespace
between the title characters, using e.g.

  H = \markup { \hspace #0.5 }
  {
    c''^\markup { foo }
    c''^\markup { \concat { f \H o \H o } }
  }


    Werner