Jack Campin <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > I think it would be better to adopt one font for the symbols (music > encoded in ABC doesn't need a great number of them) and let users > assign other fonts to specific roles in the score themselves (title > font, composer font, text annotation font...). A user who is trying > to embed scores generated by your software into other documents, or > match an existing "house style" for publication, will need the ability > to control these.
Definitely. > If you must make a choice or set a default... > > My favourite variable-width serif text font is Palatino. I arrived at > that choice by experiment: my vision is not particularly good, has been > deteriorating for years, and this was during a bad patch. I printed a > pageful of the same text at the same size in every font I could find, > seeing which one was readable from the greatest distance. Palatino > won by a big margin, with Computer Modern far at the bottom by an even > bigger one. I rather like Palatino too. The problem with Computer Modern is that to look good it requires printing at a really high resolution (Knuth's books are typeset on a phototypesetter that does something like 4333dpi, and the 600dpi that current laser printers can manage are definitely not enough), so while it is in many ways a very good design the output devices that the likes of us are likely to have around won't really be able to do it proper justice. There is a free Palatino lookalike available with Ghostscript. > I haven't done the same experiment as thoroughly with other kinds of > font, but get the impression Gill Sans would beat any other sans-serif > proportional font at the same test. I generally use Courier for fixed- > width but I'm sure there must be something better out there. Gill Sans is another one that I like. If you go with Palatino a good sans-serif font to use with it is Optima, also by Hermann Zapf (but I don't think a free version is available anywhere). You can get a CD-ROM from Bitstream that has something like 500 fonts at a very reasonable price; the fonts are not great but they are certainly more workable than the usual »1000 FREE FONTS« offerings that you get from jumble sales, and that includes fairly nice versions of Palatino, Gill Sans and Optima. For fixed width, Courier is about as bad a font as there can conceivably be. Knuth's Computer Modern Typewriter is not at all bad (and it even comes in a sane encoding, compared to the rest of CM). Recent distributions of X11 contain a mostly-free set of fonts by B&H called »Lucidux« which includes a rather nice monospaced variety. Anselm -- Anselm Lingnau .......................................... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Host: What a parasite lives in or on. Your programs have this relationship to the computer. -- Larry Wall & Randal Schwartz, *Programming Perl* To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
