Re: high-quality typesetting within lilypond

[Till Rettig]

Werner LEMBERG schrieb:
> I wonder how we are going to get high-quality typesetting within
> lilypond.  This is a fundamental question: I think we shouldn't extend
> lilypond so that it is contains a complete typesetting engine;
> instead, we should rather look for alternatives.
>
> I see two possibilities.
>
>   . We come to the conclusion that rendering with Pango is sufficient;
>     in case there are still deficiencies we should improve interaction
>     with Pango or ask the Pango people to implement what we need.  If
>     someone wants more, he or she should use lilypond-book.  Arguably,
>     this is the way to go, at least for now, since it is simple and
>     straightforward (and it has already been added to lilypond).
>   
I couldn't find so much details about pango, but it seems to miss some 
of the nicer font handling abilities of e.g. OT fonts. Here is mainly my 
concern: I would like to have *REAL* small caps when the font has them 
and not this faked stuff, it really hurts my eyes. (maybe pango indeed 
can be configured to do so?)

Well, coming from the LaTeX world it also seems quite nice to have the 
possibility to put symbols for some typographical signs that are not on 
the normal keyboard (and I couldn't get used to the neo-layout ), 
something like \`` for a typographical double quote etc. I would say 
this also agrees with the philosophy of lilypond since we also put 
musical notation with symbols and not the unicode equivalents of some 
notational signs. And what about font substitution while working with 
lilypond-book: the strings should be set in the documentation font, if I 
want them to.
>   . Use another, external typesetting library which can be linked to
>     lilypond.  For example, there have been attempts to create such a
>     library for TeX.  I have to dig out the details, but it sounds
>     interesting.
>   
I have no idea how big work this would be but the advances might be huge.

Till
>       Werner
>
>
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