Re: SMuFL: Thoughts on brackets

Knut Nergaard <knut.nergaard@gmail.com> wrote on 18/10/2015 17:38:51:

> With regard to my own upcoming music font, I've gotten some specific
> requests from engravers and editors for additional bracketed symbols
> for editorial use. At present, only a limited amount of the 
> categories in SMuFL include matching parenthesis or square brackets.
> Both are commonly used to indicate courtesy, reservation or 
> editorial markings in Urtext editions etc. Some categories are of 
> course more relevant than others in this respect; to me, the 
> Dynamics and Articulation categories are among those most sorely 
> lacking matching brackets. Including them will also give some 
> prevalence for font designers to include bracketed ligatures, which 
> would be a big time saver when setting these kinds of editions. 
> Indeed such ligatures might even be included as recommendations in 
SMuFL. 

Parentheses are not presently included in the dynamics range because the 
characters in the dynamics range are typically combined with characters 
from a normal text font, e.g. for situations where a bold italic dynamic 
is set along with text such as "espress." or "cresc.", or whatever. As 
such, it's typical for the parentheses used in dynamics to be those taken 
from the text font with which the bold dynamics are paired.

Conversations I have had with engravers working with the top publishers 
suggest that, for high-end work, in practice they use many dozens of 
different editorial brackets, e.g. different bracket heights and widths 
for different combinations of articulations (a taller one for a 
combination of, say, tenuto and staccatissimo than for a combination of 
tenuto and staccato).

This in itself is perhaps not a good reason not to provide additional 
brackets in some of these ranges, of course. As you say, one possibility 
would be to include ligated versions of specific combinations of brackets 
with other characters.

If you have a specific proposal for which ranges should add brackets, and 
what kinds of brackets should be added, by all means please share it.

Daniel

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