Re: medieval font design

[Till Rettig]

Juergen Reuter wrote:
> Hi, Till!
>
> My personal experience is that you have to fine tune the glyphs 
> anyway; hence, determining just a few coordinates should suffice (this 
> can be easily done manually if you have a really big printout of the 
> scan).
Do you mean by using xfig or inkscape or by defining the metafont source 
directly?
> For each glyph, a charbox must be specified, such that lily knows how 
> wide/high the glyph is.  In practice, a glyph may stick out of the 
> charbox (even though you probably should have a good reason to do 
> so).  In this case, I think sticking out glyphs could be useful; see 
> attached drawing (suppose that the blue curve represents the stem, the 
> red curve the flag, and the dotted lines the corresponding 
> (simplified) charboxes).
Yes, I understood this, I didn't mean though to have a diagonal stem, 
just that the stemform without flag should look different to the one 
with flag
> However, as far as I know, stems are currently drawn dynamically by 
> just creating rectangles on the fly, rather than outputting a fixed 
> glyph.  The reason for doing so is that the actual stem length in 
> general depends on a lot of other things, and therefore there is no 
> fixed stem glyph.  
Oh, this sounds logicalt, but I think for the ancient notation there is 
no need to have different lenghts -- well, lets put it that way: in 
petrucci prints there *is* no different length, and in manuscripts 
naturally there is one. But it doesn't seem to differ that much as in 
modern notation mainly due to the fact that there are no beams.
> I guess the stem printing code in lily/stem.cc would need to be 
> slightly revised to enable printing of stem glyphs.  Or, even better, 
> if you could express the stem by a polygonal shape and, given a stem 
> length, devise a method for determining this polygonal shape's 
> coordinates, then polygonal stems could be drawn on the fly in 
> lily/stem.cc, analogous to the rectangular stems that we currently have.
This sounds like an idea -- just as I said it: I think for stems there 
would be some kind of polygonal form usefull while for stems that have 
flags the form should again be rectangular. But anyways, I will first 
start the font and then think of inserting it into lilypond.
> > And still the idea about introducing some variability to mimick the 
> > handscribe, that is to have about four or five slightly different 
> > glyphs that would be used in arbitrary order. Is something like this 
> > possible in lilypond?
>
> Should be basically possible, if you modify lily/stem.cc accordingly. 
> However, I guess the result would not look beautiful, since the 
> "arbitrariness" of hand-writings actually comprehends a very complex 
> process of balancing unevenness; I fear that simulating this process 
> based on just some random numbers will not work well.
Yes, this might well be. Mainly my concern was that the glyphs shouldn't 
bee too "clean" and "smooth" looking, but this can well be done with 
only one glyph form.

Thank you very much so far for your answers!

Till