a bit of a question...

[Ray Brohinsky]

I've got a bit of a question, which I'm going to ask at the risk of
looking very stupid. (I feel that way, so it isn't much of a risk anyway.)

I have a piece which I wrote, an arrangement of four Christmas carols. I
wrote it using Music Time Deluxe, and when I had it worked pretty well
out started setting it using lilypond 1.6.1. I did a few small tweaks in
it, but for the most part, it's pretty straight lilypond. The results
are mostly fine.

I've upgraded to 1.8.1, and I've been going through the old stuff
(nearly half of the odhecaton project, a few arrangements, and two carol
arrangements. Only one is for voices, though) and updating the output.
The easy production of .pdf files is very attractive, btw. I wonder if
I've missed a control for the dpi of the output of .pdf's? or if that's
been added in 2.0?

Anyway, I try to keep backups, and it was good that I did this time.
Please, if you have the time to, look at
http://tinkl.dhs.org/~raybro/LilyUpg.html and look at the code and .ps
and .pdf files there.

First off, I simply ran 1.8.1 of ly2dvi with -p, and looked at the .ps
result. I was horrified: the font had changed from proportional to
typewriter. While the font change itself was kind of ugly, I rely on the
broader strokes of the proportional fonts to ensure that all my singers
can read the words, regardless of their age. (OK, I'm getting into that
category myself: one of the reasons I love lilypond is because she makes
scores with thick enough stave lines that they don't disappear at 4'
distance, unlike finale and the others who seem to be wedded to the
silly idea that 1pixel is a good line thickness.) Also, the circle is
missing around the \copyright symbol (although the c is still there!)

Then, I ran convert-ly to upgrade from 1.6.1 to 1.8.1. I had not put a
\version command in the original code, because I'd had some real
problems with the \version command back in 1.2 or 1.4. So I invoked
convert-ly with --from and --to, with the version numbers, and the
output was identical to the input. Then I added the \version command
seen in the code on the web page, and the output differed from the input
by exactly one byte less. Which byte was removed, I haven't determined
yet, because I can't find it. (or the lack of it). I ran ly2dvi -p on
the result, and compared both .ps and .pdf files to the -old versions.
Without any noticeable change in code, there is definitely a change to
the \copyright symbol's handling (which should be happening within LaTeX
or TeX!) and the font has changed.

Is this something I missed in the lists of things changed between stable
release 1.6 and 1.8? Am I the only one who objects to it (or less
likely, who has noticed it?) And most important, did I miss the simple
cure that Han-Wen and Jan usually provide for backwards compatibility
and adaptibility?

a befuddled raybro