Re: SMuFL Chromatic Solfege

Marek, you should find that provided you use the approach suggested of 
using the stem attachment points defined in the font metadata, you can 
achieve better results than what you're seeing at the moment: ideally you 
would measure the width of each notehead as well, rather than expecting 
each one to be a fixed width.

Daniel



From:   Marek Ledvina <ledvina.m@gmail.com>
To:     Joe Berkovitz <joe@noteflight.com>
Cc:     public-music-notation-contrib@w3.org
Date:   13/01/2018 09:12
Subject:        Re: SMuFL Chromatic Solfege



I also noticed that nothe head with names and with solfege are a bit 
larger than normal note heads. Which causing issues in rendering stem 
alignment. See attachments. I feel like the size needs to be be unified 
otherwise developers have to resize programatically named and solfege 
noteheads. 

M. 





On Jan 13, 2018, at 3:16 PM, Glenn Linderman <v+smufl@g.nevcal.com> wrote:

On 1/12/2018 5:32 PM, Marek Ledvina wrote:
Hello Joe,
We are currently working on solfege exercises and found out that SMuFL is 
completely missing the chromatic solfege syllables “note heads" like you 
can find it for example here 
http://openmusictheory.com/chromaticSolfege.html

Current Bravura only contains scale degrees ( 7 ) syllables ( do, re, mi, 
fa, sol, la, ti [si] ) which is nice start but not usable for teaching 
materials.
We need  “do, di, re, ri, mi, fa, fi, so(l), si, la, li, ti, (do)” and 
“do, ti, te, la, le so(l), se, fa, mi, me, re, ra do"
Can I ask anyone to include them into SMuFL Bravura font?
Thank you very much, Marek.


I've noticed the lack of solfege support in those noteheads also, when 
looking for characters for the very related topic of the various tonic 
sol-fa and numbered notations.  While the simplest forms of tonic sol-fa 
were designed to be "typeset" by using a typewriter


|  do re mi  - |

|   1  2  3  - |


other forms use a bit more complex notation.  There is some information 
about numbered note systems in Wikipedia[1][2][3].

While even much of the more complex notations can be produced with various 
carriage movements on a typewriter, the development of proportional fonts, 
makes it harder to achieve proper overstriking for a consistent look using 
modern technology. Some of the fonts do a better job than others, and one, 
Doulos Cipher[4] from SIL, makes a good try at being pretty complete, but 
it uses graphite font technology, which has somewhat limited support.

There are a fair number of variations in numbered note systems popularly 
used from place to place, with some special symbols not found in most 
fonts designed for orthography, making it somewhat hard to find an 
appropriate font for the numbered note systems. Wikipedia doesn't seem to 
delve into the regional differences between variations, nor does it 
include sufficient detail about any one of them to be confident of 
completeness of usage or rules in their articles.

I have various samples of numbered notation used together with lyrics, and 
some include it between the staves of CWMN (using ordinary noteheads). 
Other samples show four-part harmony using do re mi, together with lyrics. 
But while samples of usage are great, and many of the usages can be 
figured out by examining those examples, it would be great to find a 
complete exposition of the rules for various variations. I'm presently 
going by some of what Wikipedia says, some by the various samples I have, 
and some by asking questions of people that use the notation (but they are 
not likely true experts on the notation).

Because each note may have a cluster of other symbols around it, it seemed 
to be that the easiest way to achieve support in a variety of contexts and 
applications would be to custom design a font with the following 
characteristics:

1. The numbers are centered, and non-spacing.
2. Various dots, double dots, overbars, underbars, and accidentals, and 
fermatas that are placed above, below, or to the left of the basic number 
should be positioned on the same alignment point, and also be non-spacing.
3. Hyphens and dots that follow the notes could have the same alignment 
point for the first one, but then space over sufficiently that using them 
again would produce normally-spaced appearance.
4. Additional "normal" characters might be included to allow creation of 
the various notations for specifying key signatures and time signatures.

The above would suffice for a notation application.  While I chose a 
centered alignment point, the techniques would work equally well for any 
other alignment point, as long as the relative positioning of the 
characters were appropriate to their use, and they were non-spacing.

For use in a text application, each group of characters forming a note 
group would then be followed by an appropriate width space to "complete" 
the group, and maybe another one or two to reach an minimally spaced point 
to start another group, or, of course, even more spacing to reach parity 
with associated lyrics on a nearby line.

It appears the Doulos Cipher font uses Graphite for combining characters 
(a more complex solution to character overlays than non-spacing, but 
perhaps more limited in total number of combined characters?), and to 
achieve some level of support for longer beams and slurs to also be 
positioned as "slur tips" with a note group, and in the appropriate 
software that includes Graphite, complete slurs would appear.

Not finding support for numbered notation systems in SMuFL, and not 
finding any existing font that had sufficient documentation, character 
set, and quality for a current project, I described the above needs to a 
friend who cobbled together a font using characters from existing public 
domain sources, and repositioned their alignment points and widths to 
achieve the above characteristics. It works well in my notation 
application (under development, and mostly using SMuFL), together with the 
slur and beam drawing support in that application. I likely didn't find 
and include all the characters that might be needed for full support of 
various numbered notation systems, but I did include everything I needed 
for a current project, and a bit more for potentially similar projects.

I didn't find any standard codepoints for such characters or uses, and 
fear that our font, if released to the public, will contribute to the 
music font mojibake that SMuFL is attempting to correct.  Is there any 
support for the idea of including a range of characters for numbered 
notation systems within SMuFL?  I'd be happy to adjust my current font and 
application to conform to such a range if it existed.  I did currently 
pick a range high in the private use area that SMuFL is targeting, not 
currently used by SMuFL, but there may be reasons I'm unaware of that 
would make it not be the best range.  There is some redundancy with some 
SMuFL characters, done to allow for them to be non-spacing, and have 
alignment points that make the spacing calculations for the numbered 
notation simple.


[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numbered_musical_notation

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_sol-fa

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamelan_notation

[4] 
http://scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?site_id=nrsi&id=ciphermusic





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