Re: Opinions: expressive text and markup sizes

[Ben]

On 7/8/2018 2:35 PM, Abraham Lee wrote:

Hi, Ben!

On Sun, Jul 8, 2018 at 11:38 AM Ben <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello everyone,

I was wondering if I could get some feedback and opinions on something that's been on my mind today. I've been working for a while now on a small set of chamber pieces (score & parts = letter-size) and my eyes are playing tricks on me I think...

Question: what are you all using for your markup font sizes for expressive and technique texts in your scores? For instance, pizz, simile, sempre, etc.

Are you using \italic? \abs-fontsize or \fontsize? \teeny?

As I prepare to work on more large scale works (11x17 score, letter parts), I've been reconsidering my style sheet and markup size choices, so I was curious what you all do in your projects. Do you scale them all up or...my eyes are wonky, the more I stare at the page the more I have no idea what I'm thinking. ;)

Thanks for any feedback! Hope you're having a great weekend.

My personal preference, based on my own typographic observation and testing, is that the eye is used to seeing and recognizing symbols that are around a staff-space tall (like note heads). Thus, I tend to make all text sized such that they have an x-height of approximately one staff-space (or maybe a little bit less and rarely more). Since every font is designed and configured differently, there’s not a single font size that works for any font choice. This is important for lyrics especially, but other kinds of markup  text like technique and _expression_ text can really benefit from it. Keeping the text around this size makes it work at almost all global staff sizes.

Interesting! That makes sense when you put it like that, yes.

How do you go about setting a font to be an 'x-height ___' in LilyPond? I've only been using abs / fontsize as needed, which has worked so far for my ensemble sizes recently. Can you give me a small example of how you'd determine and then input that x-height? I can't picture it in my head.

Thanks Abraham!

Hope that helps,

Abraham