openLilyLib/notation-fonts

A package to manage font selection with the GNU LilyPond music typesetter. This repository is part of openLilyLib and maintained by

• Urs Liska ([email protected])
• Kieren MacMillan ([email protected])
• Abraham Lee ([email protected])

---

This package builds on the possibility to choose alternative notation fonts that has been added to GNU LilyPond with version 2.19.12. Basically the package provides a convenience layer to

• easily load a notation font
• automatically load a default stylesheet together with the font
• optionally load an extension stylesheet to access specific features of a font.

Note: The fonts are not included in this package.

Using Alternative Fonts

The easiest way to use an alternative notation font in LilyPond is:

\version "2.19.12"

% load openLilyLib
\include "oll-core/package.ily"
% load this package
\loadPackage notation-fonts
\useNotationFont Cadence

which will set up everything correctly to use "Cadence" as your document's notation font. Font names are case insensitive (so other than with the manual activation you don't need to write cadence here, and note that when the font name doesn't contain "illegal" characters (which currently only is the case with Gutenberg1939) you don't need quotation marks.

The “simple” form of \useNotationFont uses the same name for notation and brace fonts and loads a default stylesheet that accompanies each font, adjusting LilyPond's engraving settings (e.g. line thicknesses) to match the appearance of the font. However, you have more fine-grained control by using the following form:

\useNotationFont \with {
  brace = Beethoven
  style = none
  extensions = ##t
}
Cadence

This will set the brace font to Beethoven and skip loading of a stylesheet. Using none for the brace option will use the default Emmentaler brace font, which is usually a good idea when the notation font does not have a corresponding brace font (which is currently the case with the Cadence, Paganini and Scorlatti fonts).

Using none as style will skip loading a stylesheet, which you may want when creating a style sheet from scratch. Please consult the documentation about any additional styles available for a given font. if a non-existent stylesheet is requested a warning is issued and the default stylesheet is loaded.

Requesting a notation font or (even implicitly) a brace font that is not available for the given backend in the executed LilyPond installation will issue a warning and reset the (brace) font to Emmentaler, but LilyPond errors are avoided.

A font may contain extensions that can be activated with the extensions = ##t option. Currently only the Arnold fonts has such extensions, consisting of a few extra articulations and commands. Requesting extensions for a font that doesn't provide them will issue a warning but don't do any further harm.