Re: Lilypond font design

[Juergen Reuter]

On Tue, 16 Jan 2007, Till Rettig wrote:

> Hei,
>
> I was wondering if I could start some contribution to the medieval
> notation support

That would be great!

> via redesigning the fonts that in my opinion don't look
> very good. Especially referring to the mensural notehead style (I think
> the petrucci looks quite fine, but neomensural and mensural heads are
> lot too small and also a bit boring, eg. too conform).

Agreed.  I have been mainly concentrating on Vaticana style and Petrucci 
style.  As Werner already indicated, the ancient font was written before 
Lily used fontforge et al.  Therefore, the glyphs do not follow all 
prerequisites that Lily glyphs are nowadays supposed to consider (in 
particular, there are some metafont constructs, that should not be used). 
Personally, I had so far no time to convert them.  So, if you design new 
glyphs, please follow the guidelines that Werner mentioned.

Also, you should be aware of some subtle optical pitfalls such as the fact 
that e.g. the slightly thickened lines on the lower left and upper right 
of the semibrevis head make the head look asymetrical, which you may want 
to compensate by its geometry (IIRC this is partially commented somewhere 
in the .mf files).

> I know there are
> thouthands of styles due to the fact that everybody wrote their own
> style, but we might choose from them one  that would be really nice
> looking (kind of the same as the feta font does). I am not yet quite
> finished with my thinking how the heads really should look, but I think
> a really nice overall look gives the Copenhagen chancionnier, Burgung,
> late 15th century. Compare for example this page: 
> http://base.kb.dk/pls/hsk_web/hsk_vis.side?p_hs_loebenr=27&p_sidenr=8&p_illnr=0&p_frem=20&p_tilbage=9&p_navtype=rel&p_lang=dan
> or others from this book.

For experimenting, maybe at first you want to introduce a new style 
(similarly to the Petrucci style)?  Later, if your glyphs are mature, you 
still can replace the mensural/neo-mensural glyphs with those from you.

> So I would like to hear some opinions on this issue and also some hints
> about how Lilypond's fonts work (fontforge doesn't show any glyphs on
> the emental and I have no idea how to open svg fonts nor how they work).
>
> Also other issues about the mensural notation support could be solved,
> especially spacing (as in the picture), then those ligature issues. And

Most spacing problems in ancient notation are related with the spacing 
engine, rather than with the font (actually, the bounding boxes of the 
ancient glyphs should be fairly good).  You may find some further hints 
as comments in the lily/*ligature*.cc files as well as in 
ly/gregorian-init.ly and the ancient context definitions in 
ly/engraver-init.ly.

A couple of months ago, I figured out three places in the spacing engine 
which have to be tweaked in order to get equally tight spacing (although 
these changes also affected spacing of clefs, accidentals, etc., which is 
not desirable).  However, many things have changed since then in the 
spacing engine.

> it would probably be convenient to have also a kind of init file same as
> for the gregorian notation style.

Agreed.  Especially, one may want move stuff from engraver-init.ly to a 
mensural-init.ly.  On the other side, then the user will have to add a 
"\include mensural-init.ly", which you currently do not need to do (as the 
definitions in engraver-init.ly are automatically imported).  I am not 
sure about this point (i.e. having clearly separated definitions that you 
manually have to import versus putting them into engraver.ly and friends 
versus having them clearly separated but automatically always importing 
them).

> On a later plane I would also like to have integration of other styles
> of mensural notation, even starting from the modal notation of the 12th
> century France.

Yes, sounds interesting.  Also, mannered notation would be nice.  However, 
be aware that you easily end up in a kind of bottomless pit.  I think the 
real challenge here is to make the associated mechanisms on the C++ level 
more flexible (spacing engine, glyph selection, ...), such that you have 
sufficient infrastructure in order to plug-and-play styles on the scheme 
level.

Greetings,
Juergen

> Greetings
> Till
>
>
>
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