Re: ghostscript 9.56.1 in lilypond 2.23.14 no longer finds font Helvetica-Bold, but gs in 2.22.1 did

[Jean Abou Samra]

Le 08/11/2022 à 06:59, Jeff Olson a écrit :
> Excellent!  Thank you three times for your examples and patient 
> explanations!
>
> So part of the trick is discovering which lilypond font-name to 
> specify in order to embed the desired font in lilypond's postscript.
>
> My target is /Helvetica-Bold in postscript, and the wikipedia article 
> on Ghostscript indicates that "Nimbus Sans L" is the proper substitute 
> for Helvetica. So I followed your pattern and used font-name "Nimbus 
> Sans L", but (surprise 1) the generated postscript font  was 
> /TeXGyreHeros-Regular.   The Hello World output looked like Helvetica 
> but was not bold, so I specified \bold "abcxyz", but (surprise 2) that 
> didn't change abcxyz to bold and still used font 
> /TeXGyreHeros-Regular.  So font-name "Nimbus Sans L" does not appear 
> to have a bold type?
>
> Similar thing (surprise 3) with font-name "Nimbus Sans": adding \bold 
> had no effect on abcxyz and the postscript font was still 
> /NimbusSans-Regular.  Here's the code I used:
>
> \markup
> \override #'(font-name . "Nimbus Sans")
> \abs-fontsize #20
> \bold
> "abcxyz"
>
> Not knowing how to guess the right font-name, I removed the override 
> and just did \sans \bold:
>
> \markup
> \abs-fontsize #20
> \sans \bold
> "ABCDEFG#b in ly \sans \bold"
>
> That of course produced output in sans bold and the postscript font it 
> embedded was /NimbusSans-Bold.  I guess surprise 4 is that lilypond 
> knows about postscript font /NimbusSans-Bold but won't generate it 
> when \bold is specified with font-name  "Nimbus Sans".
>
> As a check, removing the \bold and doing just \sans does indeed revert 
> to /NimbusSans-Regular (no surprise).
>
> So I can get my postscript to run with /NimbusSans-Bold instead of 
> /Helvetica-Bold.  I just have to let lilypond pick the specific font 
> family for abcxyz based on the generic family.  It works, but I'd feel 
> more confident if I knew the right font-name to cause /NimbusSans-Bold 
> to be loaded.
>
> Am I still doing something wrong? (wouldn't be a surprise)




Surprise (1) is because, as far as I can see, LilyPond does not
ship with the variant "Nimbus Sans L". In the output of
"lilypond -dshow-available-fonts", only "Nimbus Mono PS
(Regular/Italic/Bold/BoldItalic)" and "Nimbus Sans
(Regular/Italic/Bold/BoldItalic)".

Surprises (2)-(4) happen because font-name is meant to be a
sledgehammer that overrides all font selection logic. In
particular, it makes \bold and \italic have no effect.
You have to use font-style instead.

By the way, what are you using PostScript code for more precisely?
It is not possible for you to switch to regular markup? (If
it's lots of paths, for example, that could be partly automated.)

Best,
Jean

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