[smufl-discuss] Re: BravuraText and multi-note chords

[dspreadbury]

Glenn wrote:

> I don't find a ligature or codepoint that allows for stacking
> multiple notes into a chord. For example, to be able to place an F
> and an A in the same chord on the treble staff... a third. Or
> similarly a fifth. This makes it hard to discuss such topics in text.

You're correct that at present there's no practical way to build a chord
using Bravura Text alone. There are some zero-width characters in Bravura
Text, but none of the precomposed notes or individual noteheads, which
might be the expected way to build chords, allow this.

One possible approach would be to add backwards spaces (i.e. characters
with negative right side-bearings) to act as counterparts to the three
forwards space characters that are included (assigned to Space, -
(hyphen), and = (equals), moving by 1/2 a space, one space and two spaces
respectively), but I suspect that the behaviour of such backwards spaces
would not be particularly reliable, and would differ substantially between
applications. This may also require a backwards space character that is
precisely the same width as a notehead (which is neither half a space, nor
one nor two spaces).

I will add this to my list of things to look at when I next work on the
fonts.

> Similar to this are the problems of aligning a bar line at the end
> of a staff character, or the variant horziontal spacing of the
> augmentation dot... it appears after the flag, for notes having a
> flag, but jammed right up against the note, for notes not having a
> flag.  The former is too far apart, and the latter too close together.

You can use Space, - or = to insert spaces of various sizes, as described
above.

> Another similar issue is that a 3/4 time signature looks to em like
> the 3 is slightly to the left of the 4. Maybe they are aligned on
> the left edge, instead of centered? It is not at all obvious how to
> achieve centering.

Time signatures are currently drawn with ligatures, to move the digits
into appropriate positions for numerators and denominators, but because
each number is moved independently, there is no knowledge of which numbers
are being used in the time signature itself. It might be possible to do a
further ligature substitution such that if a string consists of (say)
"timeSigCombNumerator timeSig3 timeSigCombDenominator timeSig4" it
replaces those four glyphs (two non-printing, two printing) with a single
glyph that contains correctly aligned "3/4" digits, and perhaps this could
be done for a subset of reasonably common time signatures.

I will also add this to my backlog of future ideas for the fonts.

Daniel

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