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

[Michael Scott Cuthbert]

I have been discussing with Daniel about this and after trying around Bravura Text (bravo!) for a while, I believe that there’s no good way to both scale the musical symbols so that they look good in relationship to the surrounding text while at the same time retaining their relative proportions to all other musical symbols.  For instance, an ornament like mordent is generally only a bit bigger than the notehead of a note and far smaller than, say, a Treble clef. So font designers should try to make symbols that are likely to be used in close proximity in a text context (such as a discussion of the symbols of various ornaments) have consistent relative sizes (as much as this is possible) while not attempting to keep relationships with other groups of symbols.

Positioning of glyphs are different in a text context.  For instance, the upward stemmed quarter note and downward stemmed quarter note need not have their noteheads at the same position. An upward stemmed note should probably rest on the baseline to look good with text. A downward stemmed note would presumably need to be higher in order not to descend below the descender line.

Best,
Myke



On May 12, 2014, at 13:55, Daniel Spreadbury <[hidden email]> wrote:

> 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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