Hi,
I'm preparing some music for our local Sacred Harp singers and finding
that the "blackness" of the Lilypond defaults and the Emmentaler font
don't work well for shape-note (\sacredHarpHeads) music in small sizes.
If I scale a staff down to 14 points to keep an entire song on one
sheet of paper, the half-note "mi" when printed on top of a staff line
gets filled in so that it's almost indistinguishable from the
quarter-note "mi".
To see the effect, compare the two staves generated by:
\version "2.13.15"
music = { \time 6/4 \sacredHarpHeads b'4 b'2 b'4 b'2 }
<<
\new Staff
{
\music
}
\new Staff
\with {
fontSize = #-5
\override StaffSymbol #'staff-space = #(magstep -5)
}
{
\music
}
>>
Other note shapes in the Sacred Harp 4-shape system don't have this
problem, or don't exhibit it to the same degree. The "mi", being
smaller than the other shapes, is the first to be filled in.
I can mitigate the problem by reducing the staff line thickness, but
that affects too many other things - note stem and bar line thickness,
for example. And the note heads, in comparison to the staff lines, then
look too heavy.
The best workaround I've found so far is to disable the loading of the
Emmentaler fonts in design sizes smaller than the default 20 points by
modifying the file scm/fonts.scm:
--- font.scm.orig 2010-03-12 17:47:07.771003400 -0800
+++ font.scm 2010-03-13 21:31:55.175195200 -0800
@@ -161,15 +161,10 @@
(caddr x))))
`((fetaDynamic ,(ly:pt 20.0) ,feta-alphabet-size-vector)
(fetaNumber ,(ly:pt 20.0) ,feta-alphabet-size-vector)
(fetaMusic ,(ly:pt 20.0)
#(
- ,(delay (ly:system-font-load (string-append name "-11")))
- ,(delay (ly:system-font-load (string-append name "-13")))
- ,(delay (ly:system-font-load (string-append name "-14")))
- ,(delay (ly:system-font-load (string-append name "-16")))
- ,(delay (ly:system-font-load (string-append name "-18")))
,(delay (ly:system-font-load (string-append name "-20")))
,(delay (ly:system-font-load (string-append name "-23")))
,(delay (ly:system-font-load (string-append name "-26")))
))
(fetaBraces ,(ly:pt 20.0)
But of course, I'd rather find a way to do the same thing within my
score rather than modifying a Lilypond system file. I've found bits and
pieces of information that suggest this can be done, but that it's not
simple, and the only examples I have deal with text fonts and not the
music fonts.
So is there a better way to control which fonts are loaded, or perhaps
which of the loaded fonts in this series is actually selected for
rendering note heads?
-Steve Tarr
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