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Re: medieval font design
From: |
Juergen Reuter |
Subject: |
Re: medieval font design |
Date: |
Sun, 4 Feb 2007 18:42:23 +0100 (CET) |
On Sat, 3 Feb 2007, Till Rettig wrote:
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?
Of course, you can use xfig to create some self-contained mf source code
(though I never tried). However, note that lilypond glyphs typically
refer to predefined values such as notespace or staff_space of
stafflinethickness and should call lily-specific macros such as
fet_begingroup or set_char_box rather than the corresponding native mf
equivalents. That is, you would have to rewrite most parts of the
xfig generated mf code anyway. You will get off probably better if you
use some existing glyph as a template, duplicate and modify it.
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.
True, but there is currently no infrastructure for typesetting stem
glyphs. So either you would have to provide this infrastructure in
lily/stem.cc (could turn out to be tedious). Or, probably much easier,
you compute the polygon on the fly (provided that the calculation of the
polygon's points is not too complex).
But it doesn't seem to differ that much as in modern notation mainly due
to the fact that there are no beams.
Not only. Stems may also be shortened to avoid colissions; notes on
ledger lines may have shorter stems for aesthetical reasons; and I think
there are a couple of other reasons.
Greetings,
Juergen