Re: Accidentals' font

[Carl Sorensen]

On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 9:25 AM Paolo Prete <paolopr976@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Jul 4, 2020 at 4:43 PM Kevin Barry <barrykp@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > > Again, I hope I am not unpleasant and polemic
> >
> > In my opinion, you are being both. If your goal was genuinely to
> > encourage improvements in LilyPond, then I hope it's clear from the
> > response that you are going about it in a poor way. Acting like it's
> > obvious that LilyPond's default font is badly designed is insulting,
> >
>
> I don't think so. Saying that Feta font has many issues, is absolutely not
> insulting.
>

I agree with Kevin.  You do not speak (even in this email) as if it is your
opinion; you speak as if it is an undisputed fact.

Personally, I prefer Feta to Gonville.  But I cannot say that Feta is
superior to Gonville, it is just my preference.


> All the fonts on the earth have many issues. If you look at the score of
> Debussy, it has *many* and *many* issues, and it was one of the best
> engraving techniques at his time.
>

Again, in your opinion it had *many* and *many* issues.


> For example, many excellent engravers do use the "Ped." classical symbol,
> IMHO so wide and messy. But they are excellent in any case.
> Music engraving is *in itself* an ocean of issues. Doing a good engraving
> is something like a Carthusian task and only in recent years things are
> generally improved, thanks to the technology.
> And we are very far from a shared "standard".
>

Since we are far from a shared standard, it is not helpful to speak in
absolute language about the performance of LilyPond.  Just because it
doesn't match your preference doesn't mean it's wrong.  Yet your emails
consistently speak of things being wrong, not just being different from
your preference.

I find it interesting that you accused me earlier of being harsh and
polemic, but you appear unable to recognize when your messages are harsh
and polemic.

I appreciate your interest in LilyPond.  And I appreciate your willingness
to develop a self-contained html editor to allow easy creation of visual
tweaks, which are then captured in the source.  I know that you use that,
and I expect others will use it as well.  Thank you for your contribution.

I am, however, getting somewhat weary of your posts that say, in essence,
"LilyPond does X incorrectly.  And it is obvious to anybody that only an
idiot would do it that way, so LilyPond needs to change."

I realize that my paragraph above is hyperbole, not literal.  And yet, that
is the feeling I get when I read many of your posts.  The tenor of your
message makes it difficult for me to appreciate the value of your
observations.  For example, in the particular case of this request, it
might be reasonable to ship a "gonville-install" script with LilyPond that
could be run to download and install Gonville (I'm not sure what all the
technical challenges of this are).  And it might be reasonable to have the
gonville-install script set the default font for LilyPond to be Gonville
(again, I don't know what all the technical challenges of this approach
are).  But because the justification for wanting Gonville is not expressed
as a preference, but instead as a defect in Feta (which should apparently
be obvious to everybody), I just tune it out.

Again, I sincerely thank you for your contributions to LilyPond.

Sincerely,

Carl Sorensen