font construction

[Jean Abou Samra]

> Hi all,
>
> Is there any documentation floating around on how fonts for LilyPond 
> are actually built? I know Abraham Lee has successfully made some new 
> ones, but is he the only guy now that knows the process? I tried 
> fiddling with working on one, but that was just by opening an extant 
> font and replacing glyphs. Somehow I think that approach might lead to 
> unexpected consequences or is it as simple as that?
>
> regards,
> Shane Brandes

Hi,

What do you want to achieve?

For just including special glyphs, you can take a look at 
lilypond.org/doc/v2.21/Documentation/notation/fonts.html.

For creating an entire font, you could replicate the structure of 
Emmentaler, I guess, or make a stylesheet (since a new font usually 
requires different defaults for various values). You may take 
inspiration at https://github.com/openlilylib/notation-fonts.

This area is being worked on currently, with Owen Lamb having conducted 
a Google Summer of Code project to improve SMuFL support. Eventually, it 
should be possible to get it right by following the SMuFL specification. 
Maybe he can provide you with more details. There is also this blog post:

https://lilypondblog.org/2020/08/google-summer-of-code-2020-smufl/

Best,
Jean