[smufl-discuss] Great work -- more suggestions

[Michael Scott Cuthbert]

Dear list,

Bravo to Bravura and everyone making this possible.

I'm at two weeks on computer music notation in my musical notation seminar at MIT and this week one of the topics for the students is to look at font implementations.  It's my first chance to look closely at 0.6 and I'm incredibly impressed with how well the working group has responded to comments.  It's really an unbelievable development.  I WILL make time for more suggestions on mensural symbols (giving an order to the list in http://trecento.com/fonts/ciconia_instructions.pdf ) since I know that y'all take things seriously here.

(btw -- the online discussion archives is getting filled up with spam; I don't know if there's a way to change that…)

Some of the suggestions are ways of allowing everything that the Bach text font can do to be replaced by a SMuFL compliant font:

Some things I see still as nice to have.

Staves: combining Staff in two widths -- one for notes and one wide enough to combine with clefs.
(combining clefs look great!)
Time signatures: use the last two symbols for a numerator and denominator combining symbol -- putting properly composed time signatures into text is very common and important.  Recommend a specific stylistic set to be used for narrower time signature numbers (when time signatures are written large they are often written more narrowly -- it's okay to make that a stylistic alternate, but it would be good if all fonts used the same stylistic set for them).
Individual Notes:  Please give a stylistic alternate or another glyph for the square breve.  Very common:  http://i.ytimg.com/vi/H2nX_Ng0tJA/0.jpg http://www.essential-music-theory.com/music-note.html, etc.
Beamed Groups of notes: THANK YOU!  Very helpful.  A Tie under each continuing beam can also be very helpful (Bach provides under 8th and 16th, and I've had to switch to graphics to get 32nds before). along with a tie over bar line glyph.  A combining tie glyph could work as well.  All other symbols (except for 64th notes; which I would love to have, but that might be greedy) except the double ties and soured triplet number can be made with other glyphs in the set.  The examples given are great.
Rests: Can we get either separate glyphs (preferred) or recommended stylistic alternates for whole and half rests with the horizontal lines included?  Breve also would be nice, but not necessary.
Octaves: can a "bassa" symbol that matches the "va" font in style and position be included? Some of us still like our "8va bassa" written out.
Mensural prolations: U+E9D2 is an error in unicode. The name needs to be Tempus perfectum cum prolatione imperfecta diminution 1  (keep the 1 for backwards compatibility).  U+E9DF could be a stylistic alternate of U+E9DE.
Again, I implore very nicely -- please provide a range for vertical displacement format characters.  I suggest 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, -1, -2, -3, -4, an "above staff" and "below staff" for 11 characters total.  With these characters, a huge range of fonts that currently exist -- from figured bass to Lassus (single-impression music) to mensural notation (Garlandia) to simple diagrams of descending vs. ascending lines to time signatures can easily be created. I would definitely use these in inline text for my online music theory assignments (http://ciconia.mit.edu/m21j/ps09.html)

Thanks so much for listening!

Best, Myke

---                                                             ---
Michael Scott Cuthbert

Homer A. Burnell Career Development Professor, MIT
Associate Professor of Music                     [phone]
[hidden email]                           http://www.trecento.com
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