[smufl-discuss] Re: Private use area?

[notenlektorat]

I'd like to use this opportunity to try to once more open the discussion
about the clef changes. Just like David I think that omitting a dedicated
set of smaller clefs for this purpose would be a grave mistake. Allow me to
illustrate with a real life example from a current engraving project:

Within the piano pieces that I am setting at the moment (in Sibelius, but it
is not necessarily an application-specific problem, in my opinion) there are
some passages that are notated in a quasi cadenza style, so the appropriate
choice was to let them appear in grace note size. Since using the actual
grace notes of Sibelius comes with a certain loss of control over
positioning and spacing, and since there is no need for cues in a solo piano
work, I opted for putting those passages in, technically, as cue notes,
while changing the scale factor for cues from its default 75% to 60% (the
default for grace notes). This works out well, with one exception: Sibelius
determines the size of clefs at clef changes by scaling the standard clefs
according to the provided cue size scale factor. And this means, of course,
that now all clef changes in the score are too small, forcing me to provide
an additional set of clef symbols at an adjusted size, which I have to put
in manually - just because the scoring application of my choice links clef
changes and cue notes in exactly the pragmatic yet in the end arbitrary way
that, if I understand it correctly, is Daniel's sole argument for not
providing a discrete set of clef change symbols.

One might argue that this is a problem of Sibelius, and on the surface it
is. But the core of the issue is that, in it's current form, the standard
basically says that it won't take care of size for cue size clefs within the
context of a SMuFL font and instead entrust this to the application. I can't
see that this is an approach that is taken with any other symbol in SMuFL
and I therefore find it highly inconsistent with the general standards of
the whole project.

Not providing at least an opportunity (like as a stylistic alternative) to
have dedicated clef change symbols is also a short-sighted snub to font
designers: anyone trying to create a font that provides a unified
typographical approach is denied control over a vital aspect of appearance.
Keep in mind that we are not talking about some obscure special symbol. Clef
changes belong to the basic grammar of Standard Notation. How is a designer
to accomplish a consistent and harmonious typographic concept while having
no fine control over glyph size for a completely common-place use case?

I'd really urge, once again, to reconsider this whole question.

Alex
 


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