Hi, Ben!

On Sun, Jul 8, 2018 at 1:00 PM Ben <soundsfromso...@gmail.com> wrote:

> On 7/8/2018 2:35 PM, Abraham Lee wrote:
>
> Hi, Ben!
>
> On Sun, Jul 8, 2018 at 11:38 AM Ben <soundsfromso...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hello everyone,
>>
>> I was wondering if I could get some feedback and opinions on something
>> that's been on my mind today. I've been working for a while now on a small
>> set of chamber pieces (score & parts = letter-size) and my eyes are playing
>> tricks on me I think...
>>
>> Question: what are you all using for your markup font sizes for
>> expressive and technique texts in your scores? For instance, pizz, simile,
>> sempre, etc.
>>
>> Are you using \italic? \abs-fontsize or \fontsize? \teeny?
>>
>> As I prepare to work on more large scale works (11x17 score, letter
>> parts), I've been reconsidering my style sheet and markup size choices, so
>> I was curious what you all do in your projects. Do you scale them all up
>> or...my eyes are wonky, the more I stare at the page the more I have no
>> idea what I'm thinking. ;)
>>
>> Thanks for any feedback! Hope you're having a great weekend.
>>
>
> My personal preference, based on my own typographic observation and
> testing, is that the eye is used to seeing and recognizing symbols that are
> around a staff-space tall (like note heads). Thus, I tend to make all text
> sized such that they have an x-height of approximately one staff-space (or
> maybe a little bit less and rarely more). Since every font is designed and
> configured differently, there’s not a single font size that works for any
> font choice. This is important for lyrics especially, but other kinds of
> markup  text like technique and expression text can really benefit from it.
> Keeping the text around this size makes it work at almost all global staff
> sizes.
>
>
> Interesting! That makes sense when you put it like that, yes.
>
> How do you go about setting a font to be an 'x-height ___' in LilyPond?
> I've only been using abs / fontsize as needed, which has worked so far for
> my ensemble sizes recently. Can you give me a small example of how you'd
> determine and then input that x-height? I can't picture it in my head.
>
> Thanks Abraham!
>

Nothing special. Though I have dreamed of a function to do it
automatically, it just takes a bit of trial and error to find the right
size because each font has a different x-height. I almost never use an
absolute font size outside of the header. If the global staff size is
relatively small e.g. less than 16pt, then it wouldn’t hurt to make the
text size a little bit larger.

HTH,
Abraham
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