The Ekmelos Font

Version 2.58

Ekmelos is a music font compliant with SMuFL.
It includes over 3000 glyphs – clefs, note heads, accidentals, articulations, ornaments, playing techniques, etc. The focus is on the numerous accidentals for microtonal music, particularly for use along with Ekmelily (see LilyPond Support) which initiated the development of Ekmelos.

The Ekmelos Font Software is a family consisting of four fonts:

  • Ekmelos
  • Ekmelos 12-EDO
  • Ekmelos 24-EDO
  • Ekmelos 72-EDO

The N-EDO fonts are extracts including mainly accidentals for the respective EDO, intended for use on Web pages (e.g. with ekmelib) to reduce the download volume.

Download and Installation

  • Download
    • The folder fonts contains the available font files.
    • Install the OpenType font otf/Ekmelos.otf on the system.
  • Documentation
    … with tables of all glyphs in Ekmelos, and a description of the metadata and the support for LilyPond.

LilyPond Support

Extensions for LilyPond that facilitate the use of glyphs from Ekmelos – and basically from any SMuFL compliant font:

Ekmelily
… supports variable accidentals and key signatures for the notation of microtonal music in several tunings: 24, 31, 36, 72-EDO, etc.
Esmuflily
… supports a variety of other music symbols: clefs, time signatures, note heads, rests, flags, articulations, performance indications, dynamics, etc.

To combine Ekmelily and Esmuflily, add e.g. the following lines near the top of your LilyPond input file to achieve LilyPond's standard behaviour, i.e. Dutch note names (default) and Stein / Couper accidentals for quarter tones (24-EDO). The first line can be omitted when using the Ekmelos font.

ekmFont = FONTNAME
\include "ekmel-24.ily"
\include "esmufl.ily"
\ekmelicStyle stc

Note: To make use of a newly installed font in LilyPond prior to 2.24, its font cache i.e. the folder "~/.lilypond-fonts.cache-2" (on Windows "%HOMEPATH%\.lilypond-fonts.cache-2") must be emptied or completely deleted. So at the next execution of LilyPond this cache will be rebuilt from scratch inlcuding the new font.

Author and License

Ekmelos was written by Thomas Richter, thomas-richteraonat
created with FontForge.

Copyright © 2013-2024 Thomas Richter,
with Reserved Font Name “Ekmelos”.

This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version 1.1.
This license is available with a FAQ in the files LICENSE.txt and OFL-FAQ.txt, and at scripts.sil.org/OFL.