Font: Including the jazz font for chords

This patch provides a new directory for third-party fonts to be shipped with the lilypond distribution. The first supported font is Jean-Pierre Gorgeon's lilyjazzchord font, but others are about to come.

http://codereview.appspot.com/3972048/

% Graham's comment: I'm not at all certain about the directory name, or the build system interaction, or the size of the otf file that's being proposed to be added to our git tree. This also touches on the GOP "git repositories" discussion topic: things like Erik's pdf should be available to us "somewhere", but I'm not certain that git master is the right place. We might end up having a "blobs" repository for large binary files. Or something.

To avoid confusing our new Patch-review guy: this is waiting for me to review it.

I remain uncertain about including large binary files in the main git repository. I think we'll need to come back to this after solving issue 980 and issue 1163.

That said, we could still add the infrastructure for including alternate fonts right now. The idea is this: 1) add a ./configure --extra-font-dir=DIR option. 2) the relevant files from that directory (.otf files? .mf files? what type of font files are we talking about?) are copied into wherever lilypond puts its fonts. 3) ... actually, I think that's about it.

Then once we've resolved issue 980 and issue 1163, we can look at having an "official extra fonts" directory somewhere, which people could use if they want. Granted, this wouldn't support having regtests for those fonts, but it would make it easy to add those fonts to the official GUB binaries. As such, we could see the jazz font (or whatever) being included in 2.15.0, without needing to force an argument about GOP stuff right now.

I'm going to mark this as "needs work", but this simply indicates that the project as a whole needs to do work before we can accept it, not because the original submitter needs to do work.

(I'm trying to keep the number of "patch-review" issues down to truly the issues which need review)

Also, the original site https://sites.google.com/site/jpgzic/home doesnt have fontforge sources for the font. Can we have confirmation that this is original work?

We don't actually need to install the fonts like this. Since this is text font (and not as music one like gonville), you can just plunk the .otf into ~/.fonts/ and it should already work.

Is this still active? There is no comment on the tracker since July 13 and the Rietveld issue is unchanged in 6 months.

I'm going to use a new needs-policy to indicate that programming work can't really continue until more fundamental questions are resolved.

This isn't really blocked on issue 1163 (website stuff) but rather on policy decisions. The Needs-policy label is good for that.

I would really appreciate jazz font for chords to be included in (one of) the next LilyPond release(s).

I have read the previous comments but I'm not sure to understand all the underlying troubles. If it could be helpful, I could try to join the (French) developer of the fonts to ask if he could provide the sources.

Why is this blocked on #980?

I don't really see the relationship. And isn't https://github.com/gperciva/lilypond-extra an appropriate place for storing binary font files?

The issue of shipping fonts with LilyPond has been renewed through #4047 which allows users to switch music fonts without patching anything. See http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2014-12/msg00073.html for a discussion.

I suggest to add the three LilyJAZZ fonts (plain, -Text and -Chord) to lilypond-extra and ship them with LilyPond.

+1 for adding LilyJAZZ fonts

IMO the best repository would be not a personal repository, but an organization repository; possibly easy to setup without going through administrative stuff. github seems the easier choice. I think that Janek created the organization account some months ago: https://github.com/lilypond

The advantage with lilypond-extra is that it is already part if the build requirements.