[smufl-discuss] Re: "Music Enhanced Text Fonts" (Slightly OT)

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[smufl-discuss] Re: "Music Enhanced Text Fonts" (Slightly OT)

dspreadbury
Administrator
Dave wrote:

> This is a difference then: my 'Music Enhanced Text Fonts' are firmly
rooted
> in the Latin character set, as the whole point is to let you write
things
> like 'Bb Clarinet',  G#7b5.  (I'm not sure how notes and chords are
referred
> to in languages which use other scripts, but having the Latin alphabet
is a
> bare minimum for me.)

What I mean is that SMuFL is just a recommended organisation of characters
in the Private Use Area. A SMuFL-compliant font may choose to implement as
much or as little of the SMuFL repertoire as is appropriate for the font
in question; the only requirement is that those glyphs found in SMuFL
should appear at their SMuFL code points.

As such, a font designer may also choose to populate any other Unicode
range in addition to whichever parts of SMuFL seem appropriate. A font
could encode the whole Latin character set, or the whole Simplified
Chinese character set, or whatever: it would still be SMuFL-compliant.

So one approach to making a "Music Enhanced Text Font" would be to
populate the complete Latin character set, then include as much of the
SMuFL repertoire as seems useful in the PUA.

Bravura Text, as it happens, does not include any characters in the basic
Latin set, since it is intended to be used with any other text font,
though it would not harm its usefulness at all, nor affect its SMuFL-ness,
if the Latin set were included in the font. Indeed, the handful of musical
symbols at U+2669–U+266F are also included in both Bravura and Bravura
Text. This is not required for SMuFL compliance, but it seems useful.

> 2. The music symbols scale on a 5 line staff which is the height of the
> EM-square.

FWIW, the guidelines for a SMuFL-compliant text font suggest that the
staff height should be equal to the caps height, rather than the (larger)
em square. Typically the caps height in a text font tends to be around
0.75–0.8em, so the staff height in Bravura Text is 0.8em.

Daniel

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