Re: Font kerning

[David Kastrup]

Valentin Petzel <valentin@petzel.at> writes:

>> Am Montag, 7. Februar 2022, 21:30:21 CET schrieb:
>>> Thanks to all for your answers. The trick suggested by Valentin works for
>>> me.
>>> 
>>> Anyway it looks like there’s no option to directly adjust letter spacing,
>>> something like \kern macro in LaTeX, right?
>
> No. As Lilypond is a music typesetter, not a  text typesetter, the text 
> typesetting options in Lilypond are quite rudimentary. This means that 
> Lilypond has no interface for these things. So kerning in Lilypond markup 
> usually means taking two markups and putting them next to each other with 
> some 
> (potentially negative) distance.

Which is pretty much what \kern does in TeX.  The difference between a
\kern and \hspace in TeX is that \hspace indicates a possible breakpoint
(and when a break happens there, it will get removed), and \hspace can
take flexible glue specifications.  And I am not sure but \kern may be
transparent to hyphenation.

LilyPond's \hspace takes no flexible glue specifications and cannot
become a breakpoint either, and hyphenation is not a thing.  So I have
no idea what your "No." is supposed to mean.

-- 
David Kastrup