Re: [smufl] Add Ferneyhough quarter-tone accidentals to the 'Other accidentals' range

William Copper <mrcopper@hartenshield.com> wrote:

> As a general rule, when a range is "completely occupied" so early, 
> that's a very bad sign.     Any fixed ranges are severe limits that 
> should be avoided as relational databases do, with one-to-one relations, 

> infinitely extendable, if that's possible.

The ranges in SMuFL are somewhat arbitrarily sized in multiples of 16, 
according to initial need. We have already expanded several ranges (such 
as time signatures, figured bass, and octaves) with "supplement" ranges, 
which is the standard practice of the Unicode Consortium when further 
requirements arise after the initial encoding has been completed.

One of the commitments that was made when SMuFL reached 1.0 was that 
existing code points would not change, to make life easier for font and 
application developers to maintain SMuFL-compliant fonts and applications. 
As a result, when further glyphs require encoding in a range that is 
already "full", we have to make a new "supplement" range.

Fortunately the Private Use Area in the Basic Multilingual Plane that we 
are using for SMuFL is more than large enough for our needs: we have 
earmarked the range from U+E000 to U+F3FF for the basic SMuFL range, some 
5120 glyphs, and we can always use further PUAs in higher planes if we 
need even more glyphs in the future.

I invite you to read some of the existing documentation in the 
specification about the organisation of SMuFL's encoding:

https://w3c.github.io/smufl/gitbook/about/how-smufl-is-organised.html

Daniel

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