Op maandag 19-10-2009 om 08:15 uur [tijdzone +0000], schreef Simon Tatham: Hi Simon,
I've recently drawn a new font of musical symbols for use with > Lilypond, which look more like the ones I'm used to and hence > distract me less. I put it up on the web this weekend at > > http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/gonville/ Wow. You created a full font? That must have taken quite some time! I think Feta took Han-Wen and me something between one and two man-years of work. Reading what you write on your site I designed it because Lilypond's standard font (Feta) was not to my taste: I found it to be (variously) over-ornate, strangely proportioned, and subtly not like the music I was used to reading. Music set in Feta looks to me like strangely stylised music; music set in Gonville just looks to me like music, so I can read it without being distracted so much. I feel a bit disappointed because one of my goals was to create a font that would look like the most beautiful music that I have seen. As one of our explicit goals for LilyPond is for the printed music /not/ to distract the player, we evidently failed to achieve this for you. Looking at Gonville it's not so difficult to imagine for me how this could be, as I cannot remember ever having seen music that looks much like it. For example, the up-flags are much fatter and rounder/shorter than the down flags, is that intentional? What is the status of the font, is it ready for general use, is it finished? Up till now we have been advertising Feta as being "the" lilypond font and describing it mostly with general terms as "beautiful" and "designed after the best typesetting traditions". In some places, possibly the essay and talks, we elaborated on the fatness, eg see the short note of font design at http://lilypond.org/web/about/automated-engraving/typography-features Now that you created a second working font for Lily, it would be nice if both fonts were [more explicitly] advertised as to what they were designed after. The LilyPond font sources contain quite a few citings of sources of inspiration, eg % Couldn't find many z examples. This one is losely inspired % by a sfz from Mueller Etuden fuer Horn (Edition Hofmeister). % Inspired by Adobe Sonata and [Wanske]. % For example, see POSTSCRIPT Language -- program design, % page 119, and [Wanske], p 41, 42. % [Wanske] says the bulbs should be positioned about 1/4 right of the % `arrow'. % [Wanske] and some Baerenreiter editions % suggest about 80 degrees instead of a half-circle % Inspired by a (by now) PD edition of Durand & C'ie edition of % Saint-Saens' Celloconcerto no. 1 % For example, the 8th rest was vaguely based on a book with trumpet % studies by Duhem, and by Baerenreiters cello suites. I included my % findings in a comment in the mf file. One of the things that I tried % to do was make the rest a little lighter and narrower than the black % note head. I think this looks better in polyphonic music, when the % rest is below a head from a different voice. % inspired by Bamberger Manuscript (15th century), in: % MGG, volume 2, table 59. A somewhat better way than "beautiful" to describe Feta could be something like the design is inspired by fonts used in traditional manual engravings publish by European music publishers in/towards the end of the first half of the 20th century [Baerenreiter, Duhem, Durand, Hofmeister, Peters, Schott]. This is sometimes regarded as the peak of traditional musical engraving practice [Hader, Wanske], [in http://lilypond.org/web/images/FISL7-slides.pdf we call it our Gold standard] [??] Annotations can be found in the font's source code. Criteria for the choice of inspirational glyphs are blackness or boldness. In contrast: computer-made often looks very "white". Delicacy or roundness. No outer corners of glyphs should have sharp edges, as the eye tends to "stick" to those points. Finally commonness or familiarness. A glyph should not look suprisingly unique. Further, common [text-]font considerations were taken into account. For example, a glyph should look balanced out. It should not lean backward of forward, inviting the reader to catch it before it falls over :-) There should also be a black/white balance. It should still look good printed in a long row. It should look good on screen as well as on paper [quite different from a computer screen, sometimes]. Curves should be smooth, have no discontinuities. What would a more explicit description of Gonville be? It would be nice if you could describe the criteria and sources of your inspiration, as opposed to contrasting it to Feta's apparent failure to meet those :-) Do you intend to have Gonville included in LilyPond? In that case it would be good if you had a [few] high resolution scans of music that Gonville strives to mimic. Is this perhaps a [step toward a] jazz font that users have been asking for? What bothers me a bit is the lightness of the font. I consider this to be an error frequently made by most post-manual/engraver [read: computer/programmer] produced music. Eg the 4/4 "C", the flat/neutral/sharp symbols [they have straight, non-brushed] stems. Also the note heads look a bit small, cat 3 or even 4, is that right on this scale from blackest to whitest [1..4] 1. Some traditional: slight overshoot, extending outside of staff line. We did not dare to do this, but it is possible and there is a comment about this in the code. ____ staff line -----/note\----- ----/ \---- / head \ 2. Feta: maximum height, just-no-overshoot staffline -----+----+----- ----/ note \---- / head \ 3. Some traditional: slight undershoot staffline ---______--- --/ note \-- / head \ 4. Most pre-lilypond ;-) computer-made music: just barely touching staff line staffline ------------ ----+--+---- /note\ / head \ > 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? (Or is there one I've missed?) 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. I'm sure if we set these for Feta already and if the font selection mechanism look at these too. Greetings, Jan. -- Jan Nieuwenhuizen <jann...@gnu.org> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter AvatarĀ®: http://AvatarAcademy.nl | http://lilypond.org _______________________________________________ lilypond-devel mailing list lilypond-devel@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-devel