As of version 2.19.12 the GNU LilyPond musical typesetter can make use of alternatives to the built-in notation font Emmentaler. For the current stable version 2.18.2 there is a patch available that can be applied reasonably simple.
The functionality has been provided by Abraham Lee
who has also provided a comprehensive array of notation fonts of different styles.
Details about the matter as well as samples and usage instructions can be obtained from
http://fonts.openlilylib.org. Regarding a simpler
to use interface please have a look at the
Stylesheets
library inside openLilyLib.
install-lily-fonts is a Python script that makes the maintenance of your
collection of alternative fonts within any number of LilyPond installations a
mostly automatic process. It is written and maintained by Urs Liska ([email protected])
and released under the GPL version 3 or later. See COPYING for details.
For the time being LilyPond expects its notation fonts in a specific folder within its installation directory. In order to alleviate some issues this causes with multiple LilyPond installations and/or updates it is advisable to store the font files in a custom location and only create links to them inside the LilyPond installation. While this is already an improvement keeping the "installation" of fonts up-to-date for multiple LilyPond versions is a tedious process.
This is where install-lily-fonts comes in: it maintains a local font repository with
a catalog of installed fonts and versions. From this it can detect additions and
pdates on the server, download and extract the archives and manage the links
in the LilyPond installation.
Note: So far this program only works on Linux and Mac OS because Python seems not able to create symbolic links on Windows. Any help regarding this issue is greatly appreciated.
The basic invocation of install-lily-fonts is:
python install-lily-fonts [options]
You can run python install-lily-fonts --help at any time to get information on the
available command line options, which is up to date even if this README should not
have been updated.
This option specifies the location of your local font repository, that is, a
directory where you want to keep the physical copies of the fonts. After the first
successful run of the program this directory will contain a CATALOG file
containing information on the installed fonts.
The directory can be passed as an absolute or as a relative path, the latter being interpreted relative to the current working directory from which the program is called.
If the resulting path doesn't point to an existing directory you are prompted to choose between creating the given directory (if you intend to create a new font repository) or aborting the program (if you misspelled the path).
If the directory exists but no font catalog file is present the program you are prompted to choose between creating it (if you intend to create a new font repository) or aborting the program (if you misspelled the path). However, if you created the directory in the previous step the program assumes you want to create the font catalog too.
TODO: verify that the program actually behaves like this.
install-lily-fonts can handle a single or multiple LilyPond installations in one run.
So this option is used to pass one or more paths to LilyPond installations to the program.
As with the --directory option paths can be given as absolute or relative paths.
LilyPond installations are detected when the path points to either their root directories
or to their binary executable. If this detections fails for any reason the program exits
without doing anything.
The option accepts one or more arguments to denote one or more LilyPond installations, e.g.
--targets ~/lilyponds/stable ~/lilyponds/devel ~/lilyponds/current-git
Alternatively the argument can point to a file listing LilyPond installations, which is
useful when you have multiple installations to maintain.
A targets file lists one LilyPond path per line, empty lines or lines starting with #
are silently ignored. Such a file could look like this:
# My LilyPond installations handled by install-lily-fonts
# Current stable release (binary)
~/lilyponds/current-stable
# Current development release (binary)
~/lilyponds/current-devel
# Build from current master
~/git/lilypond/lilypond-builds/current
[For your convenience there is an entry ignoring any files whose name start with target
in the script directory's .gitignore directory, so when running this program from its
Git repository you can add targets files in that practical location without affecting the
versioning behaviour.]
Some options can be set to control the behaviour of the program:
-l --local
If this option is passed no attempt is made to update the font catalog from the remote server. This can be used to repair broken links or when you add a new LilyPond installation and are reasonably sure that there are no remote updates.-f --force- If this option is passed the local and the remote catalogs are not compared, instead the local versions for all fonts are taken as out of date.
-b --batch
Run the program in batch mode, without any user interaction. Basically this means that any error condition will immediately abort the script with an error
Operation of install-lily-fonts comprises three stages: downloading, extracting, and linking.
The first two operations are dependent on the font repository alone, while the third depends
on the actual LilyPond installations targeted.
The first step is to download a font catalog from fonts.openlilylib.org (if the --local
option hasn't been set). This catalog contains entries for each available font, listing
the version number along with the display and file names. This catalog is compared to the
corresponding catalog in your local font repository, to detect any new or updated fonts.
If no local catalog file is found it is assumed that you are creating a new local repository
but you will be asked if you'd rather abort the program and enter a different path next time.
If a font is considered out of date - or if it is not but the corresponding file is missing - the font's archive file is downloaded from the server and extracted within the local repository. The program tries to also detect cases when extracted directories are missing and will extract them again.
The archive files are not used in the course of the font installation, but you may want to inspect them anyway, as they contain more files like usage examples and licensing/history information for the fonts.
The result of this process is a directory structure with one directory for each font,
containing an otf and an svg directory each. This is where the (single) physical copies
of the font files are stored on your disk.
The main part of the "installation" process is creating symbolic links in the font directories
of a LilyPond installation. install-lily-fonts will iterate over the target installations and
perform the following steps:
- Check if the list of font entries in the target directory matches the list of available files
for the given font. If a mismatch is detected then the target directory is cleaned (the links are
removed and new links are added to the files in the local repository). This is done to avoid the
situation that existing links point to font files that are no longer existing. However, this (so
far) only works by comparing file names, so if for example the location of the local font
repository has changed this would go unnoticed. Use the
--forceoption for such cases.
If existing entries are detected to be physical files you are prompted to choose between replacing them with the new links or to skip the installation of this font. In both cases you are asked whether the decision should be remembered for cases in fonts processed later. Usually you will want to replace physical font files from an earlier manual installation with the links to updated fonts, but the option is there, just to avoid destructive outcome.