[smufl-discuss] Re: Some ideas

[Joseph Berkovitz]

On May 31, 2013, at 12:58 PM, "David Webber" <[hidden email]> wrote:

> From: Joseph Berkovitz
>
>> In this case my opinion agrees with Daniel's: the encoding of chord symbols should be out of scope for SMuFL.

Sorry, there's a misunderstanding… I only meant that SMuFL should not attempt to encode partially or fully realized chord symbols made of multiple glyphs (which I think was the essence of Daniel's objection). I do not have a problem with code points for a small number of individual glyphs that are helpful in creating chord symbols, and in fact these will be quite helpful.

> I'm not sure what the problem is.  The necessary characters are limited essentially to
>
> alphabetic
> numeric
> parentheses
> accidentals
> plus
> minus
> and a few special symbols:
> circle in the air for diminished
> circle with a stroke for half diminished
> capital-delta-like triangle
>
> If you're happy to demand that applications just decide where to draw these relative to one another, and how to size them, that's all the font needs.

In fact I am asking for exactly that, and so I think that we're perhaps in agreement.  Any reasonable text font (SMuFL aside) will already provide these:
> alphabetic
> numeric
> parentheses
> plus
> minus

And SMuFL "text-oriented code points" can provide these:
> accidentals (these were already discussed on the list)
> circle in the air for diminished
> circle with a stroke for half diminished
> capital-delta-like triangle
and a few other chord-symbol specialties that are fairly easy to agree on.

What I am eager to avoid is attempts to build geometric relationships between chord symbol glyphs into the standard via ligatures or other font skulduggery. Those relationships are hard to codify.

.            .       .    .  . ...Joe

Joe Berkovitz
President

Noteflight LLC
Boston, Mass.
phone: [phone]
www.noteflight.com
"Your music, everywhere"


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