Emmentaler letters in LaTeX, kerning -- help wanted

Hi all,

I'm currently rewriting my lilyglyphs package (http://ctan.org/pkg/lilyglyphs, https://github.com/uliska/lualilyglyphs) to make better use of advanced Lua functionality, which I hope will be great for future extensibility. And right now I've come across a great opportunity for someone (or somemultiple) people with little programming background but great enthusiasm to help me with that effort.

There has always been a command \lilyText{} that simply renders its argument using the Emmentaler font, which works for the rather few characters in Emmentaler that are at the regular positions in the font, namely dynamic letters, numbers and punctuation. In the earlier implementation I had added a number of special commands to typeset dynamic letter combinations that need kerning, e.g. \lilyRFZ. But now I've implemented functionality to declare kerning pairs so one can simply write \lilyText{rfz} and have the necessary kerning between the 'r' and the 'f' applied automatically.

This is a huge improvement because now it's only necessary to define one Lua table with kerning pairs for each supported notation font (I intend to have lilyglyphs support all the notation fonts that are available under a free license). I have created a kerning pair matrix to print all character combinations, and I've written pairs for all the "fX" pairs in Emmentaler. Attached you'll find that row before and after applying kerning to see the effect, and the PDF with the whole matrix for Emmentaler and LilyJAZZ.

However, while this is a very uncomplicated process it is also time consuming, and I think my time would be better spent continuing with the *programming*. At the same time it would be a great opportunity for one or more people contributing to a useful package who don't have a strong programming background but are enthusiastic about finding the right kerning values at the second or third fractional digit ;-)

Requirements would only be the capability to fill in a Lua table after a model (I'd say anyone able to write LilyPond code should qualify) and to set up a LuaLaTeX system with a few unreleased packages from Github. Essentially what has to be done is complete this table/file (https://github.com/uliska/lualilyglyphs/blob/lua-only/lilyglyphs-kern-emmentaler.lua) and possibly add more for additional fonts.

I'm looking forward to any feedback and assistance
Urs

From:	Urs Liska
Subject:	Emmentaler letters in LaTeX, kerning -- help wanted
Date:	Wed, 14 Aug 2019 09:41:22 +0000