8.1.7 Font selection

By setting the object properties described below, you can select a font from the preconfigured font families. LilyPond has default support for the feta music fonts. Text fonts are selected through Pango/FontConfig. The serif font defaults to New Century Schoolbook, the sans and typewriter to whatever the Pango installation defaults to.

• font-encoding is a symbol that sets layout of the glyphs. This should only be set to select different types of non-text fonts, e.g.

  fetaBraces for piano staff braces, fetaMusic the standard music font, including ancient glyphs, fetaDynamic for dynamic signs and fetaNumber for the number font.

• font-family is a symbol indicating the general class of the typeface. Supported are roman (Computer Modern), sans, and typewriter.
• font-shape is a symbol indicating the shape of the font. There are typically several font shapes available for each font family. Choices are italic, caps, and upright.
• font-series is a symbol indicating the series of the font. There are typically several font series for each font family and shape. Choices are medium and bold.

Fonts selected in the way sketched above come from a predefined style sheet. If you want to use a font from outside the style sheet, then set the font-name property,

{
  \override Staff.TimeSignature #'font-name = #"Charter"
  \override Staff.TimeSignature #'font-size = #2
  \time 3/4
  c'1_\markup {
    \override #'(font-name . "Vera Bold")
      { This text is in Vera Bold }
  }
}

Any font can be used, as long as it is available to Pango/FontConfig. To get a full list of all available fonts, run the command

lilypond -dshow-available-fonts blabla

(the last argument of the command can be anything, but has to be present).

The size of the font may be set with the font-size property. The resulting size is taken relative to the text-font-size as defined in the \paper block.

It is also possible to change the default font family for the entire document. This is done by calling the make-pango-font-tree from within the \paper block. The function takes names for the font families to use for roman, sans serif and monospaced text. For example,

\paper  {
  myStaffSize = #20

  #(define fonts
    (make-pango-font-tree "Times New Roman"
                          "Nimbus Sans"
                          "Luxi Mono"
                           (/ myStaffSize 20)))
}

{
  c'^\markup { roman: foo \sans bla \typewriter bar }
}

See also

Examples: input/regression/font-family-override.ly.