Re: Embedding lily pdfs in InDesign

[Trevor Bača]

On 8/26/06, Han-Wen Nienhuys <address@hidden> wrote:
> Trevor Bača wrote:
> > Hi,
> >
> > Does anyone have any experience successfully embedding lily pdf output
> > in InDesign?
> >
> > I start by creating a new InDesign doc and then placing the
> > lily-generated pdf in the InDesign doc. Just to test I then export as
> > pdf, and the results are pretty bad. Staff lines, ledger lines, beams
> > and hairpins show up fine; but all noteheads, accidentals, and text
> > are missing. My conclusion is that all font elements are missing (the
> > cheese fonts for the music elemen ts, and New Century Schoolbook for
> > the text).
>
> That's strange. Does it work when you install the LilyPond fonts into
> Windows/MacOS ?
>
> > So is there anyone out there putting lily-generated pdfs into InDesign
> > successfully?
> >
> > (I would prefer to keep everything in lily, but using any fonts in
> > lily at all other than New Century Schoolbook causes explosions when I
> > send the pdf to the printers.)
>
> That's strange. What platform are you on? The lily and NCSB aren't any
> special.

Hi Graham, Han-Wen & Henning,

I've been digging around the last couple of nights trying to get
lily-generated PDFs (or EPS) to show up in InDesign correctly. And I'm
now in a position to answer comments:


Han-Wen wrote:

HW > That's strange. What platform are you on? The lily and NCSB
aren't any special.

OS X Intel with 2.9.16


HW > That's strange. Does it work when you install the LilyPond fonts into
Windows/MacOS ?

Ah, I think this is what I'm messing up. I've been trying to install
the LilyPond fonts into OS X and it's proving to be *very* difficult.
I've mentioned my installation attempts in a thread Kieren started in
February (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-user/2006-02/msg00400.html)
but the short of the matter is that using OS X's FontBook to install
the several different sizes of Emmentaler has been frustrating.
FontBook shows all the sizes as being there, but InDesign will
recognize (and display in its Font menu) only 4 or 5 of the sizes. If
I delete all the Emmentaler fonts from the whatever/Fonts folder to
which FontBook writes, and then reinstall, then InDesign will see all
the sizes *until I quit InDesign and restart*, at which point InDesign
believes there're only 4 or 5 sizes again. Grrr ...

On the other hand, NCSB installed perfectly and InDesign sees it and
renders all lily NCSB text correctly all the time.

So what are "the" LilyPond fonts? NCSB together with the Emmentaler
and Feta collections only? Or are there more? Also, are there
instructions anywhere on installing the LilyPond fonts under OS X?


Graham wrote:

GP > Didn't we discuss this a few days ago on -devel?  ... at least, did you
follow all the steps that were suggested for .eps files?  There's even a
doc section (14.8) about this issue, but it's not online yet.

GP> I think that
lilypond -dno-gs-font-load
should do what you want.

Yes, Graham's definitely right here. lilypond -dno-gs-font-load (and
Han-Wen's other pointer to -deps-font-include) *do* definitely embed
the lilypond fonts into the PDF or EPS as grepping the output file's
with grep's -a option shows (or even just using vim to nose around in
the files and look for BeginFont).

But even with the lily fonts embedded, InDesign refuses to recognize
some of the fonts and does really ugly things (see pair of
attachments).


Henning wrote:

FV > I regularly use LilyPond PDFs with InDesign (CS, CS2) and ConTeXt
and never had problems with those.

This gives me hope. But take a look at the attachments. The
"before.png" shows a bit of a lily-generated pdf as it comes out of
lily. Perfect. The "after.png" shows what happens when I place the
lily-generated pdf into InDesign and then export back out of InDesign
to make a new pdf. Yuck. It looks like the lines (staff lines, ledger
lines, tuplet brackets) are aligned according to one pattern, while
(some but not all of) the noteheads, the time signatures, and the
tuplet numbers and simply aligned according to some entirely different
pattern. (There's no musical transposition here; InDesign seems to be
shifting the noteheads in the "after.png" down and to the right, even
though it kinda looks like things have transposed down a third.)

I'm assuming what *must* be going on here is that InDesign simply
isn't seeing some of the LilyPond fonts (like certain sizes of the
Emmentaler set) and so is substituting in a really ugly way. So maybe
what I really need help with is figuring out how to install "the"
LilyPond fonts under OS X.


(This is so frustrating because all I want to do with InDesign is add
skewed, kerned text for the title and composer on the front page! I
guess I should just build the title text in InDesign, save as EPS, and
then import into lily ...)

--
Trevor Bača
address@hidden

before.png
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after.png
Description: PNG image