Lilypond with international characters
Neat, isn’t it? This example is taken from the one contained in Debian package, albeit the package itself is terribly outdated and unmaintained until Debian Etch comes. Even though the example was supposed to be usable during Lilypond 2.2.x days only (!), with some changes (specifically, filtered with convert-ly to remove obsolete constructs), it runs happily with newest Lilypond.
But — this absolutely isn’t for the faint of heart.
- It took 35+ minute to render! Yes, 35+ minute 100% CPU time on Celeron 2.4GHz. Very likely due to embedding chinese font glyph outline into postscript file.
- One has to tweak fontconfig configuration file under Linux. Fontconfig has been notoriously bad at choosing CJK fonts. Default config prefers Japanese fonts, and imagine what it looks like when a mixture of Japanese fonts and Chinese fonts are used in lyrics.
- Installing Chinese fonts — actually this is the easy part. The score fragment in this post is rendered with Kai face (楷書) from CJKUnifonts, which is readily available in all major Linux distributions if Chinese support is enabled. Rendering Japanese and Korean requires fonts for corresponding language, of course.