Re: Prioriziting a directory

[Abraham Lee]

Great questions, Jean.

As a font creator (both text and music) and semi-power user, I've always
hated that LilyPond only looks within its own data folder for music fonts.
This has required me to duplicate all my fonts to the data directory of
every new version of LilyPond I install to make them accessible to that
version. It's tolerable, yes, but feels a bit needless duplicating the same
files over and over, IMHO. So, while we're on this topic, is there any
chance the music fonts can get the same treatment as text fonts? In other
words, if the music font family doesn't exist in the data directory, search
the system's folder? Would love to be able to install them like a normal
font and use them with any version. Pretty sure I wouldn't be the only one
who appreciates that. My two cents.

Much thanks,
Abraham

On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 12:22 PM Jean Abou Samra <jean@abou-samra.fr> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> Is there a way to express this in a Fontconfig configuration
> file: "If you find a matching font in this directory given
> as relative path, ignore other matches and choose that one"?
>
> Context: LilyPond (the GNU music typesetter) uses Fontconfig via
> Pango for finding text fonts, but also for music fonts in some
> cases. The music fonts are developed together with LilyPond,
> and a given LilyPond installation should never look outside
> of its data directory for finding music fonts. However, text
> fonts should be findable on the system.
>
> If this isn't possible, I'll use two FcConfigs with Pango,
> and restrict one of them to LilyPond's datadir only, but
> currently LilyPond sets up a fallback to normal text fonts
> for its special fonts, and it would be nice to preserve
> that. I hope that's clear.
>
> Thanks,
> Jean
>
>