David Kastrup wrote >> And, additionally, it is perfectly common for a (true) slanted/italic >> character to protrude out of its box. > > So?
Ahm, yes, of course. Otherwise, you'd never get a decent letter-spacing without thousands of kerning exceptions. As a last attempt, this is an example of a real-life italic sort (in this case a ligature) where you can clearly see the the groove protruding: <http://lilypond.1069038.n5.nabble.com/file/t3887/310.jpg> If you still don't believe me, I'll have to accept that. In modern computer fonts, you still basically have the same system (FontForge metrics of Century Schoolbook L Italic with kerning removed): <http://lilypond.1069038.n5.nabble.com/file/t3887/italic-bbox.png> As LilyPond doesn't know slanted bounding boxes (just as in the olden days, see above), slanted letters often have to protrude in order to get the desired letter-spacing. David Kastrup wrote > It turns out that > > \markup \box \with-dimensions-from \italic "This is a sample text" \null > \markup \box \with-dimensions-from \italic \line { This is a sample text } > \null > \markup \box \with-dimensions-from \line \italic { This is a sample text } > \null > > has only the first box slightly larger: so in either of the two cases > below, text spaces appears to be done by LilyPond based on the > dimensions of the individual words (and disregarding the font in use) > while the first line uses Pango(?) for rendering, producing a longer > result. > > Serious case of "huh" here. Yup. But in the end, it's only a minimal deviation, and in typography and music engraving there's the rule "If you don't see a difference, there is none". :) In hot metal or early photo typesetting times, a quad was divided in about 10 to 20 units (depending on the system), fine tuning was done by stuffing sandwich paper in. So, all in all, we're well off, aren't we?. That's close enough for jazz ;) All the best Torsten -- Sent from: http://lilypond.1069038.n5.nabble.com/User-f3.html _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user