[smufl-discuss] Re: Great work -- more suggestions

[dspreadbury]

Sorry to have taken so long to come back to this, Myke. (Myke and I have
been communicating privately via email concerning the range of symbols
included in SMuFL for mensural notation, and there will be more to share
on that in due course.)

> Staves: combining Staff in two widths -- one for notes and one wide
> enough to combine with clefs.

The current glyphs for staves are 2 spaces wide; I propose adding wide
versions (3 spaces wide) and narrow versions (1 space wide) as well.

> 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.

This is doable, i.e. a control character that when followed by one of the
time signature digits causes it to be shifted vertically to where a
numerator should be drawn, with zero width, and another control character
that when followed by one of the time signature digits causes it to be
drawn where a denominator should be, but this won't give a perfect result
for e.g. 12/8 or 3+3+2/8, because it won't centre the denominator under
the numerator.  As long as this is considered "good enough", it's a
reasonable request.

> 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).

I'll add this as a possible future enhancement.

> 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.

What do you mean by "tie under 8th"? The current tie glyph is agnostic
about which note value you use it with!

> 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.

Again, I'm not completely clear what you mean here; do you mean rests
imposed on staff lines, or rests imposed on leger lines, or something
else?

> 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.

How should this look? Should it be superscript like the "va" text?

> 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.

Thanks for reporting this error, which I will make sure is corrected.

> 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)

I'm still weighing this up. It's not a small thing to require font
designers to do, since there are several classes of glyphs that should
ideally then have a further 11 variants included. Thinking about just the
notes in e.g. the 'Individual notes' and 'Beamed groups of notes' groups
alone, that's 43 glyphs x 11, an extra nearly 500 glyphs that need to be
included in a SMuFL-compliant font.

Daniel

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