[smufl-discuss] Re: Stem length and registration of precomposed note glyphs (Was: Diamond clusters)

[dspreadbury]

Knut wrote:

> 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.

You're certainly right that there are conflicting requirements here. The
second issue is more important, in my estimation, than the first, since it
is quite possible that an end user might require both notes that sit
in-line with text and have pleasing proportions with the text characters
*and* notes drawn on a five-line staff in the same document.

It may be that the best solution to this conflict, long-term, is to
introduce a new range of characters that duplicate the same basic glyphs,
but with specific guidelines as to whether the existing "Individual notes"
range or the new range should have proportions suitable for display
in-line with text. I will certainly make a note of this and consider it
for future SMuFL revisions.

> 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.

There is certainly precedent for notes used in metronome marks to have
proportionally shorter stems and larger noteheads, and (at least to my
eye) they look better this way. So I plan to keep the notes intended for
use in metronome marks with shorter stems, in Bravura at least.

Daniel

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