From: SMuFL Discussion [
[hidden email]] on behalf of Mark Johnson [
[hidden email]]
> I thoroughly agree with Alex’s entire epistle. In my opinion the inclusion of smaller clefs at their own separate codepoints is an example of “legacy encoding” – the purpose of which is to preserve round-trip conversion to Unicode and back to another encoding. Given the argument that small clefs are are not different symbols, semantically, I fail to imagine a situation where that kind of conversion would actually be useful.<
No they're different symbols: one for the start of a piece and reminder repeats at the start of lines (sometimes omitted in jazz) and one indicating a change of clef.
And they *are* very like upper and lower case versions of the same letter. There can indeed be small differences of shape (or indeed different shapes) between upper and lower case letters, but if you are hung up on this, then just look at the cyrillic alphabet which also has upper and lower case code points and all letters are more or less identical apart from size in upper and lower case. And indeed the clefs don't have to be identical - different font designers may well prefer different relative stroke thicknesses.
The purpose of different symbols, as in the case of capitals and lower case letters, is nothing to do with 'round trip conversion' of anything. It's to do with having a 'font' rather than a collection of shapes. Can you imagine someone writing a program like Windows notepad (or your favourite text editor) and having to write code like:
select font
start loop
get letter
is this a lower case C?
if(yes)
{
select font at smaller size
print upper case C
select font at normal size
}
else
{
print letter
}
to start of loop
Yet that is exactly what you want programs to have to do in order to use a collection of symbols with clef changes absent from the font. (And I don't have to 'imagine' anything - having been producing music notation software for 20 years now, which has always avoided such nonsense in its drawing code.)
The question essentially boils down to "Is SMuFL a specification for a *font* or is it just a taxonomy of symbol shapes?"
Dave
David Webber
Mozart Music Software
http://www.mozart.co.uk#############################################################
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