Re: goal of current programming

[Jan Nieuwenhuizen]

Werner LEMBERG writes:

> I see a lot of changes related to fonts, font encoding, input
> encoding, etc., in the CVS.  What is the near-time goal of your
> changes?

The long-time goal (somewhere this Easter :-) is to have LilyPond do
proper page layout.  For page layout, it is necessary for LilyPond to
know the dimenions of all titles and other printed stuff.  Most of
that is possible with markup text, and thanks to Nicolas we can
construct markups in Scheme.

If we want to replace [La]TeX titling kludges (in lilypond.py), we
must at the very least offer something that is capable of printing our
own examples (Les N'er'eides, S"angers Morgenlied) without relying on
the TeX backend.  That implies minimal font encoding handling.

Problem is, Han-Wen and I know near to nothing about font encoding,
except that running `info iconv' or `iconv -l' is scary (we found out
this week).  We have not yet found the trick to let someone else
implement it, and besides, we like to learn by doing.

However, if you know just a bit about encoding, if would be great if
could help.

> Reason for asking is support for Japanese -- I've written some Haiku,
> and I would like to use lilypond for typesetting them.

Yes, that would be nice.  I have been looking at pango a bit (last
time I looked was in somewhere in 1998/1999), but it seems they still
not render to PostScript/PDF.  In fact, I was sure that pango had a
broken postscript render option[1], but I cannot seem to find it
anymore.

>From what I've learned, I think we should `just wait' until GNOME gets
it printing structure cleaned up.  I've only been able to find a stale
musing about intergration of the gnome-print/postscript api into
Pango[2].

> There is still the question how to support non-Latin scripts in
> general...

Yes, good question.  I'm not even sure if/how Pango could help.  I'm
sure that a latex klugde (or even nicely documented workaround) can be
devised using GUILE, but that would be unrelated to our encoding
efforts, afaics.

> A few weeks ago we had this email exchange:

[snip: the latex detour]

Jan.

[1] http://www.levien.com/gnome/pango-0.1.html
[2] http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-devel-list/2001-September/msg00270.html

-- 
Jan Nieuwenhuizen <address@hidden> | GNU LilyPond - The music typesetter
http://www.xs4all.nl/~jantien       | http://www.lilypond.org