I'd probably use symbols. They can be kept in the user profile, so they won't get clobbered when you next upgrade Inkscape.

There is scant documentation on symbols, but they are like clones that are stored in a library accessed by all documents.

NB due to scale issues in 0.92x, I suggest building the symbols and all your documents with the units=px and scale=1. (Save it as your default.svg in the user profile.) After setting that scale, if you change the units you can leave the scale to adjust itself and all will be well.

TD

On Tue, Jan 23, 2018 at 12:58 PM, Kale Good <kale@...3333...> wrote:

Hello,

My use case is this: I want to use inkscape to annotate my pdf music scores. Basically "highlighting" stuff different sections and adding text, etc for performance directions. 

One thing I'd like to be able to do is quickly and easily add common musical symbols (examples here: http://lilypond.org/doc/v2.18/Documentation/notation/the-feta-font#dynamic-glyphs) (I'm not sure why the heading is "Feta Font" and then it mentions "Emmentaler font"). The example show is already on my system and open-source. I have SVG font files files (which I've never used and aren't showing up in my Character Map software) and .otf (I think; or some other common font format) files. Additionally, I can have the music program export each character/musical symbol as an individual SVG.

I thought the easiest way to do this would be to use a character map application. On inspection, that seems to be less than optimal to say the least (the fonts that lilypond uses seem to be spread through about 10 different font files, and may fields are empty. I have a very, very hard time finding them there). It seems like it would be easier to memorize the 30-50 utf encodings + the specific font name (is it emmenalter-15 or emmenalter-16?) than using that. And, obviously that isn't easy. Additionally, some font characters often appear together (for example, the symbol for forte, f often appears with an m in front of it as a modifier), and that just adds some complexity.

The other solution I think may be useful for other, more common use-cases; however, I can't seem to find any implementation of it.

So, barring some unforeseen solution there, I think the better option is this: to have some sort of "bank" or "library" docked tab that I can add the desired symbols/shapes to. Then I can just drag and drop these into different projects (this would probably involve having lilypond export each desired symbol, opening the resulting SVG file in Inkscape, and copying each vector into the "library").

Does this functionality exist somewhere that I'm just missing?

Thanks,

Kale

Inkscape 0.92

Arch Linux

--
Kale Good
Good Music Academy ♫
4705 Baltimore Ave, Phila, PA 19143
phone: (215)260-5383

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