Re: Super and sub

[David Kastrup]

John Gourlay <address@hidden> writes:

> Joram,
>
> As you say, LaTeX is for producing beautiful mathematics and LilyPond
> is for producing beautiful music. It’s possible that the conventions
> in the two different kinds of typography differ in their placement of
> sub and superscripts, and so LaTeX and LilyPond should differ in their
> behavior. This seems like the first question that should be answered
> before asking whether LilyPond is making the best placement
> choices. I’ll let people with more experience in music notation weigh
> in.

Super- and subscript heights and sizes are usually chosen in connection
with the default font heights and x-heights and baselineskip.  So
I don't see that blind adoption of LaTeX's defaults (which are a
massaged version of plain TeX's defaults, with plain TeX being rather
firmly written serving the aesthetics of the Computer Modern font
family) will automatically lead to best results.

Of course, where the current situation is "this looks awful", getting
one's start values from LaTeX for comparison is a possible first step.
It's also reasonable to look for visual compatibility of music and text
footnotes for lilypond-book.  Of course, let's hope that Texinfo and
LaTeX have made somewhat similar choices, and that HTML does not dictate
something else yet again...

-- 
David Kastrup