[smufl-discuss] Re: Glyph Registration and Graphical Metadata

[Joseph Berkovitz]

I also favor single occurrences of glyphs and letting the app do the resizing of cue, grace, etc.

The only multiple code points that I really favor are those that achieve results which go beyond simple rescaling. Otherwise I fear we get into a very long and murky set of arguments about which scales should be present, and glyph scaling is surely something that any layout engine must expect to be doing a lot of.

.            .       .    .  . ...Joe

Joe Berkovitz
President

Noteflight LLC
Boston, Mass.
phone: [phone]
www.noteflight.com
"Your music, everywhere"


On May 30, 2013, at 11:27 AM, "Daniel Spreadbury" <[hidden email]> wrote:

> Dave wrote:
>
>> I'd have thought therefore that the objective for SMuFL would be to
> enable
>> you to write music (at a given size and style)  without having to change
>
>> fonts or font styles.    But it seems that you're telling me that this
> is
>> not the objective?
>
> At this point, I'm agnostic about whether or not it should be possible to
> draw every possible musical symbol at any conceivable size without having
> to use the font at more than one point size. My guess is that this is, in
> its full generality, not a practical goal.
>
>> I am happy with the recommendation not to use precomposed glyphs.  But I
>
>> *would* like a grace note heads, grace-note-sized accidentals, and
>> grace-note tail flags so I don't have to select the font at another size
> to
>> draw grace notes.
>
> You would also, then, presumably want all noteheads, all accidentals and
> all note tails available at a third size for cue-sized notes, which are a
> different size than grace notes? Cue notes are (per Gould, p.659) 75% the
> size of normal notes, and grace notes are "slightly smaller" (Gould,
> p.125). How much smaller than cue notes should grace notes be? You and I
> may have different opinions about that!
>
> In any case, we're now talking about adding 82 x 2 glyphs to the standard
> to duplicate all noteheads, all accidentals, and all tails at three sizes.
>
> And what about tremolo slashes? Do we need to provide them at three sizes?
> What about articulations? What about other symbols that might be drawn on
> stems, such as buzz rolls or sprechstimme crosses? What about jazz
> articulations that are positioned to the left or right of notes? And on
> and on.
>
> This is why I don't believe it is possible in general to provide the means
> of drawing all conceivable music on a given staff size using separate
> glyphs in a single font at a single size: the amount of duplication
> required is really not insignificant.
>
> This seems to me a classic trade-off: duplicate hundreds of glyphs at two
> smaller sizes in a font, and have the complexity of requiring calls to
> separate code points for every possible symbol that could be drawn at
> three sizes, versus having a consuming application using the font at up to
> three sizes but use the same code points in each case.
>
> I remain deeply unconvinced about this, and my proposal is still to encode
> glyphs only at their normal, i.e. full, size, and leave it up to consuming
> applications to handle scaling.

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