12.1 Overview of the Emmentaler font

Emmentaler was created specifically for use in LilyPond. The font consists of two sub-sets of glyphs. “Feta”, used for clasical notation and “Parmesan”, used for Ancient notation. The sources of which are all found in mf/*.mf.

The font is merged from a number of subfonts. Each subfont can contain at most 224 glyphs. This is because each subfont is limited to a one-byte address space (256 glyphs maximum) and we avoid the first 32 points in that address space, since they are non-printing control characters in ASCII.

In LilyPond, glyphs are accessed by a ‘glyph name’, rather than by code point. Therefore, the name of a glyph is significant.

Information about correctly creating glyphs is found in ‘mf/README’. Please make sure you read and understand this file.

TODO – we should get mf/README automatically generated from texinfo source and include it here.


LilyPond — Contributor’s Guide v2.24.4 (stable-branch).