Issue 870 in lilypond: Enhancement: easier support for alternative music fonts

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Status: Accepted
Owner: v.villenave
Labels: Type-Enhancement Priority-Low OpSys-All Font

New issue 870 by v.villenave: Enhancement: easier support for alternative  
music fonts
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=870

So far, LilyPond only supports the Feta music font.  However, Simon Tatham
has shown that using a different font is achieveable:
http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2009-10/msg00161.html

"
Currently the only way I've found to use that font with Lilypond is
to create a symlink mirror of the entire Lilypond data directory,
replace the 'fonts' subdirectory, and point $LILYPOND_DATADIR at the
altered copy. Would it be possible to introduce a command-line or
configuration option of some sort, to make it easier to select an
alternative font?
"

Jan answered:
"
I think the glyph lookup and handling code is already parametrized.  Have a
look at lily/note-head.cc:internal_print, it gets the default
font from ly/paper-default-init.ly:

 #(define font-defaults
    '((font-encoding . fetaMusic)))

It looks like you'd want to keep the fetaMusic encoding and add some
other characteristic, possibly -family, -shape, or -series.  So we
could have

 #(define font-defaults
    '((font-encoding . fetaMusic) (font-family . feta)))

which you can then override by using (font-family . gonville) in a
\paper {} block.
"

However, accordingly to Simon there could be some "trivial changes to
Lilypond to make it easy to use an alternative font", for instance with
regard to the way time signatures are printed.

Another question is to know whether we could distribute some alternative
fonts with LilyPond.  Simon's Gonville font is nearly ready and is
available on http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/gonville/ -- but
other cool things could be possible, such as the "jazz font that users have
been asking for", as Jan pointed out.

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