User README for Gonville
========================

This directory contains Gonville, a font of musical symbols drawn by
Simon Tatham and usable as a drop-in replacement for GNU Lilypond's
default symbol set.

Installation
------------

At the time of writing this, GNU Lilypond has no convenient
command-line option for specifying a different font of musical
symbols. It expects to find its symbols in the 'fonts' subdirectory
of its data directory, which is typically somewhere beneath
/usr/share/lilypond.

However, one thing you can do is to configure the location of that
data directory using an environment variable. Therefore, the
installation script for Gonville works by constructing a copy of the
whole Lilypond data directory, filled with symbolic links pointing
at the original files; then it replaces the 'fonts' subdirectory
with one containing Gonville instead of Lilypond's standard font.

So, to install Gonville, you should:

 - First choose a pathname for the replacement data directory.

 - Run the 'lilysetup' script with three arguments. The first
   argument should point at the 'lilyfonts' directory in Gonville's
   release distribution; the second should be the original Lilypond
   data directory; the third should be the new directory name. For
   example, I keep my replacement Lilypond data directory in my home
   directory, so I might run
   
   ./lilysetup lilyfonts /usr/share/lilypond/2.10.33 /home/simon/share/gonville

 - Now set the environment variable LILYPOND_DATADIR to the pathname
   of the new directory. In my case, for example, I would then run

   export LILYPOND_DATADIR=/home/simon/share/gonville

   Then running Lilypond in the normal way should generate output
   using the Gonville symbols.

 - If you want Lilypond to default to using Gonville, you will need
   to add that environment variable setting to some piece of
   persistent configuration on your system. I put the above 'export'
   command in my '.bashrc' file, but the details may depend on your
   local system.

If you're running Lilypond on Windows, I'm afraid no equivalent of
the 'lilysetup' script is currently provided. You'll have to do it
by hand using the Windows Explorer or the Command Prompt: find the
Lilypond data directory, make a complete copy of it, delete the
'fonts' subdirectory in the copy, move Gonville's 'lilyfonts'
directory into the copy and rename it to 'fonts'.

Supported features
------------------

Gonville has been tested against Lilypond 2.10.33 (the version
included in Debian 5.0), 2.12.2 and 2.13.5. It supports all the same
symbols as the standard fonts for those versions of Lilypond, except
for the following omissions:

 - Solfa note head shapes (set using shapeNoteStyles) are not
   supported.

 - The 'longa' note (twice as long as a breve) is not supported.

 - Ancient notation (mensural, Gregorian chant etc) is not
   supported.

In addition, Gonville may not work with other versions of Lilypond,
which may have changed the names under which they expect to be able
to find symbols in the font file. I intend to try to keep Gonville
up to date, but please let me know if there are any support problems
with a more recent version of Lilypond.
