Re: Better support for Bravura in LilyPond

[Daniel Benjamin Miller]

You're right, it does essentially replicate Dorico's style.

I don't think LilyPond should change what its default style is; I don't 
like the Emmentaler font myself (Simon Tatham put it best, though I 
actually feel the same about Gonville: 
https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/gonville/ - "I designed it 
because Lilypond's standard font (Feta) was not to my taste: I found it 
to be (variously) over-ornate, strangely proportioned, and subtly not 
like the music I was used to reading. Music set in Feta looks to me like 
strangely stylised music; music set in Gonville just looks to me like 
music, so I can read it without being distracted so much.)

But I also think that we should not try to change the defaults. But I 
also think that almost nobody actually cares much about music 
typography, really: only LilyPond and Dorico have really put effort into 
creating their default fonts and appearances; MuseScore borrows its 
fonts from both, and Finale and Sibelius' fonts are really clearly not 
that seriously taken.

LilyPond is not static, but it should not really change in terms of its 
defaults either. Much like TeX, we should not change the default fonts, 
in my opinion (though of course Emmentaler and Feta are being expanded 
as new features are added to LilyPond, and slight tweaks and 
improvements are all well and good).

On 6/25/20 3:06 AM, Martin Tarenskeen wrote:
> On Thu, 25 Jun 2020, Daniel Benjamin Miller wrote:
>
> > I'd like to share something: 
> > https://github.com/dbenjaminmiller/bmusicfonts
> > I personally prefer the Bravura design to Emmentaler/Feta, and 
> > there'd been
>
> Thanks for this, I am going to try it for sure. I like Dorico's 
> output, and this will sort of give a similar result for LilyPond if I 
> understand correctly?
>
> Which leads to a more philosophic question. Do we want LilyPond scores 
> to have an immediately recognizable "personality" or are we slowly 
> moving to a situation where everyone, including LilyPond, is trying to 
> look the same (when using default settings), and it will be hard to 
> see if a score was typeset in LilyPond, MuseScore, Dorico, Finale, or 
> Sibelius?
>
> I hope LilyPond will always try to keep a distinct personality in the 
> default output, which is not a static thing but can be discussed in 
> the Lilypond user and developers community, changed, and improved 
> continuously. But let not all our efforts go to looking as much as 
> possible like "the other ones".
>
> I know LilyPond is (almost) flexible and tweakable enough to have it 
> all, but what I am talking about is the default output.