Re: Accidentals' font

[Jean Abou Samra]

Hi Paolo,

Le 08/07/2020 à 02:07, Paolo Prete a écrit :
> I have to apologize for the tone I used.

Thank you. “Apologize” is definitely a magic word.

> What was wrong was the fact that my words sounded like absolute 
> blaming to someone/something.
> But please, even if I was wrong with this tone (and I can confirm this 
> again and again):  understand that
>
> 1) My intention was absolutely not to blame anything of Lilypond: as I 
> told before, I consider the "bold"/plate approach of modern engraving 
> as a problem for the readability of *all* the music engraving of any 
> software/company.
> Lilypond itself has nothing to do with this (nor Feta has to do with 
> it: it’s simply a general rule, which I think derives from commercial 
> reasons).

Well, in fact, LilyPond’s documentation claims the plate engraving 
approach to be the very specificity of LilyPond from the beginning. 
Looking at github.com/engraving-challenges/estrella 
<https://github.com/engraving-challenges/estrella>, I find the other 
versions much lighter than LilyPond’s. Perhaps the software involved in 
the contest have evolved since, I don’t know.

> 2) My intention was absolutely not to press developers/maintainers to 
> develop anything. My idea was, instead, to show how good it could be 
> to use what I consider an *impressive* work *already done* by someone 
> else. Just link it, do not develop anything.


I would like to emphasize that this is not at all simple. I agree that 
the technical part is reachable. Yet, this has consequences on the 
organization of the LilyPond ecosystem that have to be considered with care.

Fonts external to LilyPond also have development cycles that are 
different from LilyPond’s. If Gonville or other fonts were integrated as 
built-in options, we would end up receiving bug reports or feature 
requests from fellow users about fonts which we are incompetent about. 
It would force the authors of these fonts to follow LilyPond issues and 
make changes in parallel with Feta, for example, make it SMuFL-compliant 
by the end of the summer, which is very demanding. When the original 
author will not be available or no longer willing to support it, users 
will complain about the font not working and other LilyPond developers 
will need to fix it, and first learn its generation system, which is a 
custom one entirely different from Feta’s.

In the end, the LilyPond team is responsible (or feels responsible) for 
maintaining a piece of software that typesets music, and one music font. 
Adding built-in support for more fonts means officially supporting them, 
which entails more responsibility for developers, a responsibility that 
they need to be willing to accept and competent for undertaking. It’s 
another area in the multitude of areas of knowledge required to make 
LilyPond work across releases. See? To each their own problems.

Fonts are undergoing a very serious effort by Owen Lamb as part of GSoC, 
which should make LilyPond comply with the SMuFL standard and thus 
facilitate the use of many different fonts, not only Gonville. In fact, 
it recently came to my mind that if Feta is to become usable in other 
notation software, it could be an idea to move it to a separate 
repository, distribute OTF files alone, and include these in the 
distribution, which should also adress the built-in handling of other 
fonts along the way. First, it’s urgent to wait for Owen’s project to be 
completed. Then, when the right time comes, reflect about wether the 
LilyPond team and community are ready to accept this reorganization.

Sincerely,
Jean