Hi List,
Tonight I'd like to share with you some tools I'm experimenting for a couple of weeks that can ease to make drawings with the 'path' command.
Almost everyone here uses postscript images when a new glyph is needed. But it may causes some issues (no svg, some overrides are not possible e.g. color...)
So why not using 'path'?
For sure, when I first put my eyes here (scroll down until 'samplePath'):
http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/graphic.fr.html with its weird fight glove glyph it looked a little mysterious. But after many trials and with some self-made tools to help me finding the right coordinates it revealed that it's a pretty powerful toy.
And a recent conversation made me think that maybe I could re-think and enhanced those tools and shared them with you. So, here we go!
The idea is to use LP and your favorite editor as a cad.
So please find herewith "graphPaper.ily" and an unfinished example to show you how my glyphs are constructed.
Basically, all you need is knowing how to find coordinates on a graph, combining an original glyph behind the graph paper and follow the lines with the specific path commands: moveto, lineto, curveto, closepath (note that I only use absolute coordinates).
"graphPaper.ily" includes a graph paper ("1" equivalent to the distance between 2 staff lines) and ready to use tangents to help you to choose the right Bézier coordinates.