Re: Font kerning

[Valentin Petzel]

Hello David.

TeX takes care of text output entirely by itself, while Lilypond delegates 
this to Pango. This makes handling certain things quite a bit more awkward in 
Lilypond. So while \hspace does work similarly to \kern it does not really 
have the same function.

In TeX we could for example do
This is a Test\kern0.2pt word
for what Lilypond would need
{ This is a \concat { Test \hspace #0.1 word } }

Thus my "no" means to say that there is in fact not such a direct way to 
adjust letter spacing in Lilypond.

Cheers,
Valentin

Am Montag, 7. Februar 2022, 22:47:30 CET schrieb 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.

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