Re: kerning/ligatures in opentype fonts

[Simon Bailey]

Hi Hraban,

On Fri, Jan 17, 2014 at 4:28 AM, Henning Hraban Ramm
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Hi,
> as far as I scanned the thread nobody analyzed the problem of the shifted 
> umlaut diacritic.

true, but i did find the root cause. ;)
>
> You might look up „composed“ vs. „decomposed“ Unicode - e.g. OSX uses (or 
> used to use in previous versions) decomposed Unicode, where always 
> „composing“ diacritics are used, opposite to complete glyphs. (That caused me 
> some headache when I read directory trees with a Python script and wrote TeX 
> markup from it, while TeX didn’t understand composed Unicode glyphs. Of 
> course Python’s Unicode handling can fix it, but you have to know about it.)
>
> So, I guess some software on your way decomposed your umlauts, and your PDF 
> viewer can’t cope with it - did you try another PDF viewer? Is the display 
> the same on different OSs?

somewhere in bouncing between OS X, linux and (seldom) windows, this
umlaut became decomposed. or was entered decomposed. (I can't remember
which computer i wrote _those_ lines of code on). Didn't really matter
whether I was viewing the file on OS X (with preview) or evince on
linux -- the umlaut was shifted and two squares, rather than 2 round
dots over the U. sooo:

> If it’s in all viewers, the problem may be again in your version of pango.

maybe. the ligature problem occurs with the 64-bit version of pango
shipped with lilypond, but doesn't with the 32-bit version. maybe the
32-bit version doesn't have problems with decomposed diacriticals, but
as i fixed my input file before installing the 32-bti version of
lilypond, i can't really test that immediately. and testing it ranks
rather low on my priority list right now -- currently it works. what i
will test, as soon as i get round to it, is if i can get lilypond from
the distribution .tgz to use my installed pango libraries rather than
the bundled ones -- at the moment, i can only generate scores with
ligatures on my linux box, which isn't my main working machine...

regards,
sb

-- 
Do not meddle in the affairs of trombonists, for they are subtle and
quick to anger.