3.5.5 Replacing the notation font

Gonville is an alternative set of glyphs to Feta – part of the Emmentaler font – and used in LilyPond. They can be downloaded from:

Here are a few sample bars of music set in Gonville:

Gonville_after

Here are a few sample bars of music set in LilyPond’s Feta glyphs:

Gonville_before

Installation Instructions

For more information, see Other sources of information.

Note: gonville-*.otf files are for the ps and cairo backend (for PDF and PostScript outputs, as well as all output formats when using the Cairo backend). gonville-*.svg files are for the svg backend. For more information, see Advanced command-line options for LilyPond.

The following code changes the notation font to the Gonville font.

\paper {
  property-defaults.fonts.music = "gonville"
}

For more information, see Changing fonts.

See also

Learning Manual: Other sources of information.

Notation Reference: The Emmentaler font, Changing fonts.

Known issues and warnings

Gonville cannot be used to typeset ‘Ancient Music’ notation and it is likely newer glyphs in later releases of LilyPond may not exist in the Gonville font family. Please refer to the author’s website for more information on these and other specifics, including licensing of Gonville.

Other notation fonts

If you have other notation fonts like fontname-*.otf and fontname-*.svg, you can use them in the same way as Gonville.

That is, copy the fontname-*.otf files to …/share/lilypond/current/fonts/otf or …/share/lilypond/X.Y.Z/fonts/otf. If you have fontname-*.svg files, copy them to …/share/lilypond/current/fonts/svg or …/share/lilypond/X.Y.Z/fonts/svg.

Note: At the moment, LilyPond expects the font file names to have the following suffixes, all of which must be present in the above installation folder(s) to work properly: -11, -13, -14, -16, -18, -20, -23, -26, -brace. For example, emmentaler-11.otf, emmentaler-20.svg, etc.

The following code changes the notation font to the fontname font.

\paper {
  % font file name without suffix and extension
  property-defaults.fonts.music = "fontname"
}

LilyPond Notation Reference v2.25.22 (development-branch).