Re: Change text font size globally

[Lukas-Fabian Moser]

Hi Kieren,

Am 02.09.24 um 14:37 schrieb Kieren MacMillan:

> I’m curious… For years I’ve been using the following snippet for absolute font sizing:
>
> [... allowGrobCallback and absFontSize ...]
>

For historians: The original seems to be https://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2013-07/msg00429.html, written by Jan-Peter Voigt with input from David Kastrup.

> I believe I $pon$sored it a decade or so ago (cf. https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2016-02/msg00023.html).
>
> Questions:
>
> 1. What’s the difference between “my” function and this new one?
>

Your (or Jan-Peter's) function allows setting an absolute font size for grobs (assuming the grob's stencil depends on a fontsize setting reflecting "absolute" font size in a meaningful way).

Valentin's proposal of re-defining toplevel-text-handler effectively adds an \abs-fontsize command in front of all top-level markups (i.e. \markup ... outside of scores).

My \abs function allows to write \abs \markup ... instead of \markup \abs-fontsize ... - which is not terribly useful, but was created in response to Werner's question whether it's possible to create a replacement for \markup that automatically sets an absolute fontsize.

So while these situations are all connected, they are in fact distinct.

> 2. Do we need all of these different absolute-fontsize functions? Can’t we have one that Does All The Right Things™?
>

I think this question is too general to be meaningful, but it might be worthwhile to try and make it more well-defined.

Recently I created a score and parts for a symphony, and I really wasn't happy that changing the global-staff-size for the score also affected the font sizes for the score header (title etc.). But on the other hand, there are obviously markups that _should_ scale along with the staff size.

So maybe there should be an internal distinction between markups of one or the other kind that's not being made yet.

> 3. Does it make sense to get at least one of these into the main codebase, instead of having them all floating around in the ether[net]?
>

At the very least, \allowGrobCallback seems sufficiently general and elegant for this. But I'm not sure whether there are applications besides font properties. Or, maybe better yet: The LSR and, maybe, a Documentation snippet might be the right place for Jan-Peter's function.

Lukas