Re: Unicode accidentals vs. Markup accidentals

[Werner LEMBERG]

> Lilypond ships with a text font as well as a music font.  I agree
> that I suspect that currently Lilypond's text font does not actually
> define these Unicode music characters, so it falls back on the OS to
> find them.  Why not just add copies of Emmentaler glyphs to the
> Lilypond text fonts for characters within the Unicode spec?

IMHO, there is zero benefit of doing that.  I guess one of the first
action a slightly more advanced user does is to change the default
fonts to something else, because the default is not 'sexy' enough to
most people.  Irrespective of that it would be an additional burden to
us to maintain such modifications.

> I also don't think it's unreasonable to suggest that the default
> typography should look good.

No question – I think the default *does* look good, as demonstrated in
my previous e-mail.

> I hope we can agree that the output on staves 1 & 2 is significantly
> worse than the output on staff 3 (attached picture if it doesn't
> display inline for you).

Yes, but you are using the wrong commands.  Have you actually noticed
the example I've sent in my last e-mail?

> Staves 1&2 are Unicode and default markup glyphs as in my original
> post (compiled on Windows). To get staff 3 the following is
> required:
> 
> \new Staff {
>     c'1^\markup\concat\vcenter { B \hspace #0.2 \fontsize #-1.5 \flat }
>     c'1^\markup\concat\vcenter { C \hspace #0.1 \fontsize #-2 \sharp }
>     c'1^\markup\concat\vcenter { D \hspace #0.2 \fontsize #-1.5 \natural }
>   }
> 
> IMO Staff 3 should be the default output, not something that
> requires so much tweaking.

I rather suggest the following

```
F = \markup { \smaller \number ♭ }
S = \markup { \smaller \number ♯ }
N = \markup { \smaller \number ♮ }

\new Staff {
  c'1^\markup \concat { B \F }
  c'1^\markup \concat { C \S }
  c'1^\markup \concat { D \N }
}
```

If you look more closely, the accidentals produced by `\number` are
different from the ones produced by `\flat` and friends.  The former
are mainly for text markup and thus have more reasonable metric
values, while the latter are suited mainly for non-text markup.

BTW, the new text accidentals are new in version 2.24.


    Werner