Re: [musicxml] Separate Roman numeral analysis and chord symbols (#295)

I agree with the points Michael Cuthbert raises above.  In particular, regarding 4), a fundamental problem with sharing code and representions between RNA and chord symbols is that "6" means something entirely different.  For RNA, it means first inversion, not a major sixth chord.  So software that handles RNA needs to know this, and needs to be able to represent it meaningfully in the MusicXML (and same on importing the MusicXML).  6) is also an important thing to consider if one is trying to write software to, say, convert betwene chord symbols and RNA.  Not sure it matters if it's up to the user to enter the RNA.

Side note: some of you may be aware I have developed a font for RNA.  It's free / open source and should work in any application/OS that supports OpenType features for fonts.  The idea is you type something very straightforward like vii065/IV and it automatically renders reasonably with no special application support needed:

![fontforge_5vKZLBZ1kf](https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/1799936/67311395-b806e780-f4bc-11e9-90a7-5beeeacb6c2a.png)

See https://github.com/MarcSabatella/Campania

I figure this font may be interesting to people interesting in this topic, but its use also raises some interesting questions relevant to the topic.  We have implemented RNA support in MuseScore with no parsing at all - we just rely on Campania to render the text for us.  That made the implementation in MuseScore very simple, but it does mean we don't have an internal representation to work from in exporting MusicXML (whereas for chord symbols, we do our own parsing.

I expect I'll end up writing a parser to RNA in MuseScore eventually, mostly to support MusicXML once this is finalized, but then I'll have the problem of making sure the MsueScore parser is consistent with what Campania is rendering.

What this all suggests is that it might be nice to actually try to standardize on a "grammar" for RNA.

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Received on Tuesday, 22 October 2019 17:18:58 UTC