David sed:
> (b) They're very quick for font designers to produce - just copy the main one and
> change size to 75% or whatever.
That is exactly why there is no point in multiple-encoding them! If
you want scaled glyphs, it's cheaper and SO much less confusing to
just use the font in a different size the way current software has
been doing for decades. To me the whole point of having smaller
change-clefs as alternate glyphs is so they can be designed, like
small caps, with strokes comparable to the full-size glyphs, not
merely scaled.
Small caps were separate fonts in PostScript days, but now in OpenType
they are usually an alternate style in the same font, as Daniel has
been saying. The analogy {full-size clef : smaller clef-change ::
capital A : lowercase a} is weak. The clefs have the same form; the
letters do not. A clef change has the same function as a clef on the
left side: setting the pitch on the staff. Capital and lowercase
letters have many different functions, one of which is semantic
distinction (the others are typographical). And where Unicode has
small cap letters as separate codepoints, they are for non-alphabetic
functions – IPA and other phonetic extensions.
Having separate glyphs for clef sizes is part of the larger issue of
optical sizing. Large OpenType families nowadays have 3 or 4 optical
sizes as separate fonts. As far as I know there is still not a
standard automated method of choosing appropriate optical sizes. I
want SMuFL to set (or at least suggest) a standard method for optical
sizing in music (and of course the new software to the be the first to
implement it). This is why we must define the character set right the
first time. Style alternates vs. more codepoints = vertical vs.
horizontal; I'm for the former.
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