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Daniel wrote:
"Normal circumstances" meaning, presumably, drawing notes in a scoring
application with a precomposed glyph, rather than building up a note using
glyphs for the notehead and flag, and a primitive line for the stem?
Under normal circumstances the stem is 3.5 spaces long. I would regard all instances of shortened stems, although very common, as exceptions to this rule.
Since stems on unbeamed notes are not always 3.5 spaces long (e.g. due to stem
shortening for an up-stem note positioned near the top of the stave, or a
down-stem note positioned near the bottom of the stave, etc.; or due to
lengthening the stem to accommodate more tails in the flag), I would still
recommend that scoring applications should construct notes out of glyphs
and a primitive line.
I totally agree with this. My issue isn’t with these glyphs not being proportioned to act as the default note characters in a scoring application. I’m rather thinking of two special circumstances: 1. Whenever, for any reason, a note must be placed manually and independent of staff position, and still look like a regular note (with regular stem length). Not all current scoring applications are equipped to handle these situations without the use of font glyphs. (Finale is one exception, where notes can be drawn using notehead and primitive in the Shape Designer, but this would take more time than locating a precomposed glyph in a font.)
2. In a text editor context where the notes are drawn within a five line staff and without any special reason for the stem to be shorter than its normal length of 3.5 spaces.
For use along with text, a base stem length of 2.75 spaces gives a better
sense of proportion in comparison with the usual x-height and caps height
of a regular text font. Since the primary use of the characters in the
"Individual notes" range is for mixing with text, this seems like a decent
starting point.
This is true as long as your talking about situations where notes aren’t drawn on a staff. (e.g., metronome marks or editorial remarks in a preface to an edition.) Since SMuFLs guidelines for Text based fonts states that the staff hight should be 80% of the hight of the em to make the staff hight compatible with the cap hight of a regular text font, I don’t see a reason why the glyphs in the Individual Notes range should be 0,75 spaces shorter than this.
The present guidelines (both for fonts for scoring software and fonts for
text-based applications) do not in fact mandate a specific stem length for
these glyphs, so font designers are free to approach this however they
wish.
That’s true, but my thinking is that to make fonts as interchangeable as possible, such proportional issues should ideally be resolved at the standard level rather than be left up to the individual font designer.
One further point that I should have raised when we were last discussing
this in February: you stated that you weren't sure whether or not you
should produce a separate version of your font for use in text-based
applications. In general I think this will prove to be a necessity, due to
the requirement that the line height for a font intended to be used in
line with a text font must be much smaller than the line height that
results from following the guidelines for a font intended for use in a
scoring application. Again, I agree wholeheartedly. What I wasn’t sure about was weather or not to provide support outside of a scoring application environment. If that was the case, these glyphs could still work as note characters in metronome marks and special scoring situations, provided they were correctly proportioned and registered.
Knut wrote:
Sorry for bringing this up once again (apparently I feel strongly
about it), but looking through the individual notes range in Bravura
Text, I see that the shortened stems of 2,75 spaces have been
retained in this font as well. As a result, these can’t be used
under normal circumstances (which require a full length stem).
"Normal circumstances" meaning, presumably, drawing notes in a scoring
application with a precomposed glyph, rather than building up a note using
glyphs for the notehead and flag, and a primitive line for the stem? Since
stems on unbeamed notes are not always 3.5 spaces long (e.g. due to stem
shortening for an up-stem note positioned near the top of the stave, or a
down-stem note positioned near the bottom of the stave, etc.; or due to
lengthening the stem to accommodate more tails in the flag), I would still
recommend that scoring applications should construct notes out of glyphs
and a primitive line.
For use along with text, a base stem length of 2.75 spaces gives a better
sense of proportion in comparison with the usual x-height and caps height
of a regular text font. Since the primary use of the characters in the
"Individual notes" range is for mixing with text, this seems like a decent
starting point.
The present guidelines (both for fonts for scoring software and fonts for
text-based applications) do not in fact mandate a specific stem length for
these glyphs, so font designers are free to approach this however they
wish.
One further point that I should have raised when we were last discussing
this in February: you stated that you weren't sure whether or not you
should produce a separate version of your font for use in text-based
applications. In general I think this will prove to be a necessity, due to
the requirement that the line height for a font intended to be used in
line with a text font must be much smaller than the line height that
results from following the guidelines for a font intended for use in a
scoring application.
1. Revert the recommended glyphs in this range back to their pre
version 1.12 counterparts.
2. Include stylistic alternates or additional recommended versions
of these glyphs with shorter stems, and with noteheads sitting on
the baseline.
Since this is an area not, at present, explicitly covered by the
guidelines, your recommendations are really for Bravura more than for
SMuFL more generally, I think. You should feel free to take whatever
approach works best for your own font.
Daniel
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Phone: +49 (40) 21035-0 | Fax: +49 (40) 21035-300 | www.steinberg.net
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