[smufl-discuss] Request for comment: Proposal for SMuFL metadata files

[dspreadbury]

I have been working, in collaboration with Joe Berkovitz of Noteflight, on
specifications for metadata files designed to help software vendors
support both the SMuFL standard itself and SMuFL-compliant fonts.

What we have come up with is the following metadata files in JSON format (
www.json.org). For SMuFL itself, there are two files:

1. A canonical set of glyph names for the mandatory glyphs in SMuFL,
mapped to their Unicode code points. Glyph names are specified using lower
camel case.

2. A means to group similar glyphs together into classes. This may be
useful for applications that intend to support SMuFL-compliant fonts to
know, for example, which glyphs are noteheads, which are clefs, etc., to
help make decisions about glyph positioning.

For SMuFL-compliant fonts, we have devised a format that captures
information that cannot be directly defined in the font's data. The
metadata file includes suggested engraving defaults that are complementary
with the font designer's intentions for things like line thickness, etc.,
as well as attachment points to help software vendors ensure good
connections between (say) stems and flags, and stems and noteheads.

All of these files are described in detail in a new 'Notes for
implementers' (pages 17 following) section in the SMuFL documentation, a
new version of which is available for download here:

http://www.smufl.org/files/smufl-0.7-draft.pdf

(Note that there are no glyph changes, additions or corrections in this
draft; the purpose of this revision is to document the proposed metadata
files and to add the canonical glyph names to the main glyph tables in the
document, which have consequently had to be reformatted. The final SMuFL
0.7 release will include some pending changes and additions, which I will
take care of in the near future.)

You can download an example of the glyphnames.json file here (at present,
the classes.json file is not included, though the format is described in
the SMuFL documentation):

http://www.smufl.org/files/smufl-metadata.zip

Finally, you can download an example of a font-specific metadata file for
Bravura from the following link:

http://www.smufl.org/files/bravura-metadata.zip

Your comments are welcome!

Thanks,

Daniel

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