Re: [Lilypond-auto] Issue 2455 in lilypond: Lyrics should be compressed when there's not enough horizontal space

[lilypond]

Comment #2 on issue 2455 by address@hidden: Lyrics should be compressed  
when there's not enough horizontal space
http://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2455

You might read Hàn Thế Thành's dissertation  
(http://www.tug.org/TUGboat/Articles/tb21-4/tb69thanh.pdf#page=317) about  
this topic, implemented in pdfTeX (and activated for many fonts if you load  
the `microtype' package).  The essential conclusion is that compression and  
expansion must be applied very carefully to avoid disturbing effects.   
IMHO, the compression values you've used in your examples are far too  
large, making them extremely ugly.

Another complication: Making glyphs bolder while squeezing them at the same  
time is only possible with either Adobe's Multiple Master technology or  
Apple's AAT fonts since you need two font axes to control that (one axis  
for the boldness and another one for the squeezing factor).  The former has  
officially been abandoned, and the number of available fonts for the latter  
is very limited, unfortunately.

Given these problems, I suggest not to start with this before your other  
lyric issues have been resolved.