[smufl-discuss] Re: Wrong names for note names in french

[Ahmed Tahar]

Le 22 juil. 2013 à 15:38, David Webber <[hidden email]> a écrit :

> From: Ahmed Tahar
>
>>> German does indeed have different note names for altered notes  (like As and Ais for Ab and A#)  but apart from  H for B and B for Bb I don't think this is a problem because Ab7 is (i believe) the normal way to write that chord in German.   However other alphabetic characters do appear like Hv for Bdim.<<
>
>> For now, H# is missing.
>
> My concern is only for how chord names are written using the font.   If the font has H and # then H# is not missing.
>
>> I don't know the note names for each languages. The japanese, byzantine and indian names seems to be different though. So maybe to so extent you're right.
>
> But again, the question is not whether the note names are different, but whether they're used for writing chord symbols in the music.    [I've seen various western European variants:  B7 Hv La9,  and I've even seen a "half-German" convention where B is H but Bb is still Bb, but I've never seen japanese, byzantyne, indian, cyrillic, greek, arabic, ... scripts used for chord names in music, but maybe that's just my experience.]
>
> To give a more concrete idea of where I'm coming from: in my own software, Mozart, the chord names are constructed from symbols in the music font, and the music font predates the rise of unicode, so it is a Windows Symbol font restricted to less than 256 characters.   So that it can encompass chord symbols, it contains characters A B C D E F G (and H for German notation), the numbers 0-9, as well as individual glyphs for 'aug' 'dim' 'maj' and the graphic dim, half-dim, maj7-triangle>  But it can't contain the whole alphabet.   It can be used to write chord names in anglophone and german conventions B#7 H#7 etc, but cannot do french/italian/spanish.. eg La#7, because there's no 'L' or 'a'.     This has been requested and is on my to-do list.   To develop this capability, I need a font containing letters a-z and A-Z and accented vowels (there's little point in trying to manage with fewer) as well as the graphic dim half-dim maj7-triangle symbols.  So my objective is to get away from the old fashioned symbol font and go to unicode.   Which is why I'm taking such a close interest in Smufl :-)

In the subject of writing chord names, I share Daniel's point of view: smufl should defined the muscal symbols other than text. For text, the application should used a basic text font (Times, Arial, etc.) despite the meaning of the musical indication. If some symbols are missing from this font (like circle, plus, etc.) smufl should provides them.

For the note name noteheads, it's different. We can't used a standard notehead and just draw the text under it. The result will be less pleasant to the eye. That's why I think we need to duplicate the note name noteheads according to the naming convention (english, german and french are a good start).

Musically,

Ahmed Tahar
Functional Analyst // Arobas Music
http://www.guitar-pro.com
http://www.mysongbook.com
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