GNU LilyPond

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Node:Text markup, Next:Invisible grobs, Previous:Font selection, Up:Tuning output

Text markup

LilyPond has an internal mechanism to typeset texts. You can form text markup expressions by composing scheme expressions in the following way.

 \relative c' {
    \fatText
    a^#"upright"
    b_#'(bold "bold")
    c^#'(italic "italic")
    d_#'((bold italic) "ff")
    e^#'(dynamic "ff")
    f_#'(lines "one" (bold "two"))
    g^#'(music "noteheads-2" ((raise . 2.4) "flags-u3"))
  }

Normally, the Scheme markup text is stored in the text property of a grob. Formally, it is defined as follows:

text: string | (head? text+)
head: markup | (markup+)
markup-item: property | abbrev
property: (key . value)
abbrev: columns lines roman music bold italic named super sub
        overstrike text finger volta timesig mmrest mark script
        large Large dynamic

The markup is broken down and converted into a list of grob properties, which are prepended to the property list. The key-value pair is a grob property. A list of properties available is included in the generated documentation for Text_interface .

The following abbreviations are currently defined:

columns

horizontal mode: set all text on one line (default)

lines

vertical mode: set every text on a new line

roman

select roman font

music

selects the Feta font (the standard font for music notation glyphs), and uses named lookup

bold

select bold series

italic

select italic shape

named

lookup by character name

text

plain text lookup (by character value)

super

superscript

sub

subscript

overstrike

the next text or character overstrikes this one

finger

select fingering number fontstyle

volta

select volta number fontstyle

timesig

select time signature number fontstyle

mmrest

select multi measure rest number fontstyle

mark

select mark number fontstyle

script

select scriptsize roman fontstyle

large

select large roman fontstyle

Large

select Large roman fontstyle

dynamic

select dynamics fontstyle

One practical application of complicated markup is to fake a metronome marking:

#(define note '(columns
  (music "noteheads-2" ((kern . -0.1) "flags-stem"))))
#(define eight-note `(columns ,note ((kern . -0.1)
  (music ((raise . 3.5) "flags-u3")))))
#(define dotted-eight-note
  `(columns ,eight-note (music "dots-dot")))

\score {
  \notes\relative c'' {
    a1^#`((columns (font-relative-size . -1)) ,dotted-eight-note " = 64")
  }
  \paper {
    linewidth = -1.
    \translator{
      \ScoreContext
      TextScript \override #'font-shape = #'upright
    }
  }
}

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Copyright (c) 1997--2001 Han-Wen Nienhuys and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

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