Re: LilyPond and FontForge

[Andrew Bernard]

Hello Fasola,

I may be wrong, but I thought Emmentaler is defined using Metafont, 
which is very powerful and very sophisticated. I am not aware that you 
can edit the glyphs with a font design tool.

I use custom fonts heavily in my work with New Complexity School scores. 
You define the notehead outline as a path, and use your new definition 
instead. It involves a lot of experimentation to get the shape you want, 
but it's not impossible, and very much worth it. Doing this, I have no 
problems with alignment such as you mentioned. I will admit I have never 
quite got semibreves just exactly right - they are tricky for reasons 
you will soon discover.

Just to give you a bit of a taste of the flavour of this work, here's an 
extract from my custom notehead functions showing how a path is defined. 
There's other machinery in Scheme necessary to make it all work, and I'd 
be happy to share that with you, but I will omit from this post for now.


% for unfilled notes
sOne =
\markup
\override #'(filled . #t)
\path #0.01
#'((moveto    0.00  -0.35)
   (lineto    0.08  -0.28)
   (curveto   0.08  -0.32   0.10  -0.33   0.18  -0.33)
   (curveto   0.48  -0.33   1.03   0.08   1.03   0.28)
   (curveto   1.03   0.34   0.94   0.33   0.93   0.33)
   (curveto   0.65   0.33   0.08  -0.05   0.08  -0.28)
   (lineto    0.00  -0.35)
   (curveto   0.00   0.00   0.55   0.55   0.90   0.55)
   (curveto   1.00   0.55   1.10   0.50   1.10   0.35)
   (curveto   1.10   0.00   0.55  -0.55   0.20  -0.55)
   (curveto   0.05  -0.55   0.00  -0.45   0.00  -0.35))


All pretty low level, yes, but the complexity is not  really that high.

Probably I should use Metafont myself, but I have not been able to get a 
copy of the book (at any reasonable price!).


Andrew


On 10/08/2019 6:06 am, fasola wrote:
> I may be having the same problem. I'm using FontForge to make adjustments to
> the shapenote note heads in emmentaler so they are more readable. This
> involves changing the width of some symbols. When I generate my custom
> version of emmentaler, some of the note heads don't line up with the stems.
> Perhaps the problem is the LILC, LILF, and LILY tables? Could someone please
> explain how to update them? Help greatly appreciated!
> pond-user