Re: ghostscript 9.56.1 in lilypond 2.23.14 no longer finds font Helvetica-Bold, but gs in 2.22.1 did

[Jeff Olson]

On 11/7/2022 12:02 AM, Jean Abou Samra wrote:

>       \version "2.23.80"
>       
>       
>       \markup {
>       
>       \postscript "
>       
>           /NimbusSans-Regular findfont
>       
>           4 scalefont setfont
>       
>           (Hello, World!) show
>       
>           "
>       
>       }
>       
>       
>       \markup
>       
>       \override #'(font-name . "Nimbus Sans")
>       
>       \translate #'(100 . 0)
>       
>       "abcxyz"
>       
>       
>       ...
>       
>       N.B. The way I found "NimbusSans-Regular" was by running
>       
>       LilyPond with --ps and looking at the generated PostScript
>       
>       code (search for BeginResource in it).
>

Excellent!  Thank you three times for your examples and patient explanations!

So part of the trick is discovering which lilypond font-name to specify in order to embed the desired font in lilypond's postscript.

My target is /Helvetica-Bold in postscript, and the wikipedia article on Ghostscript indicates that "Nimbus Sans L" is the proper substitute for Helvetica.   So I followed your pattern and used font-name "Nimbus Sans L", but (surprise 1) the generated postscript font  was /TeXGyreHeros-Regular.   The Hello World output looked like Helvetica but was not bold, so I specified \bold "abcxyz", but (surprise 2) that didn't change abcxyz to bold and still used font /TeXGyreHeros-Regular.  So font-name "Nimbus Sans L" does not appear to have a bold type?

Similar thing (surprise 3) with font-name "Nimbus Sans": adding \bold had no effect on abcxyz and the postscript font was still /NimbusSans-Regular.  Here's the code I used:

\markup
\override #'(font-name . "Nimbus Sans")
\abs-fontsize #20
\bold
"abcxyz"

Not knowing how to guess the right font-name, I removed the override and just did \sans \bold:

\markup
\abs-fontsize #20
\sans \bold
"ABCDEFG#b in ly \sans \bold"

That of course produced output in sans bold and the postscript font it embedded was /NimbusSans-Bold.  I guess surprise 4 is that lilypond knows about postscript font /NimbusSans-Bold but won't generate it when \bold is specified with font-name  "Nimbus Sans".

As a check, removing the \bold and doing just \sans does indeed revert to /NimbusSans-Regular (no surprise).

So I can get my postscript to run with /NimbusSans-Bold instead of /Helvetica-Bold.  I just have to let lilypond pick the specific font family for abcxyz based on the generic family.  It works, but I'd feel more confident if I knew the right font-name to cause /NimbusSans-Bold to be loaded.

Am I still doing something wrong? (wouldn't be a surprise)

Jeff