Re: Next step for easier custom music font switching

[Abraham Lee]

Janek,

Thanks for your thoughts.

On Sun, Jul 20, 2014 at 3:47 AM, Janek Warchoł 
<address@hidden> wrote:
> Btw, just to make sure: have you seen
> https://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=4014 ?

Yeah, I saw that and I think it's awesome!

> A thought: i'm missing the possibility to set the weight of the music
> font used by LilyPond for a particular score.  In other words: let's
‘2’
Yeah, that makes sense. That's exactly how Feta (Emmentaler) is 
designed. Each optical size has a different weight, where "heavier" 
ones are designed for smaller print sizes and "lighter" ones are 
designed for larger print sizes. In the font files, they are actually 
the same size. 

The challenge here is how each of the glyphs get "heavier" or 
"lighter". This is a non-trivial design problem. I guess we could use 
FontForge's ability to uniformly change a font's weight, but I think 
this automagic change might not be what we really want (maybe it is). 
If you look at what changes the weights of the different optical text 
fonts, you'll find it's more than just making all the lines thicker 
(which is what FontForge does). Even Feta doesn't change like this 
through the different sizes. It changes more in some places than in 
others, preserving certain features and highlighting others. It's a 
complicated task. I really, REALLY like the idea of optical fonts, but 
I'm not sure if they should be required due to the design challenge 
associated with them. By comparison, you won't find many optical text 
fonts out there for this very reason.

Originally, when I was making Cadence, this is what I wanted to do, and 
maybe I still will, but it takes a TON more effort to make eight 
different fonts that differ by intentional weight changes than just 
using the same one. Not the ideal result, I agree, but I'm not sure 
what else to do about that. 

If we wanted to spend the time to really design the optical sizes for 
each font family, then, yeah, being able to specify a heavier optical 
weight at a size that differs from its intended size might be helpful, 
but just ask Han-wen, et al. about the effort that went into making all 
the different optical sizes for Feta. I'm not sure if this capability 
would be useful for some time.

Regards,
Abraham