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## Re: Font questions about absolute

 From: Aaron Hill Subject: Re: Font questions about absolute Date: Sat, 11 May 2019 12:16:01 -0700 User-agent: Roundcube Webmail/1.3.8

```On 2019-05-11 10:52 am, Reggie wrote:
```
Is there any easy way to quickly see or convert absolutely font to #3 or #5 and so on? In frescobaldi like a function() or something. Thank you for any
```help.
```
```
```
Within \markup, you can use \abs-fontsize to get a specific size that will not scale based on the global staff size. That does not require any conversion.
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If you are trying to set the relative font size of a grob that produces text and you want it to match a specific absolute font size, then you are going to need to break out your calculator and do some arithmetic. (LilyPond has some Scheme functions to assist here.)
```
```
One thing to understand is the logarithmic scale that LilyPond uses for relative font sizes. A value of 6 results in doubling the size of a font, whereas a value of -6 will halve the size of the font. Each increment of 6 in either direction is another doubling or halving. So in this system, adding an amount on the logarithmic scale results in multiplying the value on the linear scale.
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The magstep and magnification->font-size procedures help with converting between linear and logarithmic. So (magstep 6) will produce 2.0 as output, and (magnification->font-size 1/2) will produce -6.0 as output. But if you need to do the math by hand, here are those functions:
```
magstep(x) = 2 ^ (x / 6)
magnification->font-size(x) = 6 * log_2(x)

```
(Recall that a logarithm of any one base can be used to compute the logarithm of any other base. So to compute the base-two log above using the natural log is simply: ln(x) / ln(2).)
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Another thing to be aware of is how the global staff size plays into font size. The default is a 20pt staff (5pt staff spaces) and a resulting font size of 11pt. The ratio of 11/20 is important, since if you were to shrink the staff size to 16, for example, the resulting font will be 16 * 11/20 = 8.8.
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Putting this together, we can calculate precisely what the resulting font size would be given our knowledge of the global staff size and the relative font size of a text element. Likewise, we can determine a relative font size that will result in an absolute font size.
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For the first case--going from relative to absolute--let us assume we have a staff size of 18 and our grob's font-size is 2. The global font size is 18 x 11/20 = 9.9 and the magnification factor is 2^(2/6) ~= 1.26, so our result is approximately 12.5pt. And in Scheme, we could say:
```
(* 18 11/20 (magstep 2))
--> 12.4732183939592

```
For the second case--going from absolute to relative--let us assume we have a staff size of 24 and need to set the grob's font-size so that the result is exactly 18pt. The global font size is 24 * 11/20 = 13.2. To get from 13.2 to 18 requires a magnification of 18 / 13.2 ~= 1.36. This, in the logarithm scale, is 6 * log_2(1.36) ~= 2.68. In Scheme, we do:
```
(magnification->font-size (/ 18 (* 24 11/20)))
--> 2.68475386182733

```
Now all that said, is this "easy"? Depends on your comfortability with maths, I suppose. I usually stick to relative font sizes and do not concern myself with the absolutes, since it is my eye that determines whether something is big enough or small enough, not a ruler.
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Of course, I recently did have to use the above computations when I was typesetting hymns for projection. I needed to have the flexibility of changing the staff size independent of the lyric font size as I was experimenting with what would look good. So rather than have to compute things by hand, I used something similar to the absolute-to-relative Scheme code above.
```

-- Aaron Hill

```