Re: SMuFL: rotated arpeggio glyphs?

Hi Owen,

Thanks for your email.

SMuFL is designed to be font technology-agnostic, and in particular it is intended to be possible for simple web-based apps that may not have access to OpenType features to correctly position and lay out musical symbols from a SMuFL-compliant font.

The multi-segment glyphs in SMuFL are horizontally orientated at least partly for historical reasons, i.e. it’s how previous generations of music fonts have worked (though I guess that may not be the case for Emmentaler – I did look at Emmentaler in some detail early in the SMuFL project, but primarily for the purposes of surveying its glyph repertoire rather than examining its registration/orientation), and because it’s easy to use the normal advance width mechanism of typical left-to-right text layout to produce the appropriate tessellation. In general rotation of a run of text is easy (or easy-ish) to achieve regardless of the underlying graphics API.

SMuFL does encode a “repeatOffset” anchor in the metadata to allow apps that don’t render multi-segment lines as a simple run of text to know where to position the next item, but this is typically not needed if the anchor position matches the advance width of the character.

We probably should add some text to the specification providing some more insight about how these ranges are intended to be used – I’ll add an issue to remind me to revisit this in the next update to the specification.

Daniel

From: Owen Lamb <owendlamb@gmail.com>
Date: Monday, 20 September 2021 at 06:48
To: public-music-notation@w3.org <public-music-notation@w3.org>
Subject: SMuFL: rotated arpeggio glyphs?

Hello,

In my work on making the Emmentaler music font SMuFL-compatible, I've found the way SMuFL encodes arpeggios a bit hard to grasp.

The arpeggiato segment glyphs (wiggleArpeggiatoUp, etc.) appear to be turned on their side, meaning that programs would have to rotate them in order to use them. However, I can't seem to find how this is to be done in the specification. Does SMuFL dictate how programs should place arpeggios? If so, how?

In addition, a fellow LilyPond contributor has brought up that there are other, better ways to encode a vertically tesselated glyph (see this message on the lilypond-devel archive: https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/lilypond-devel/2021-09/msg00048.html). Is there any reason not to introduce a model in which the arpeggio glyphs are upright from the start?

Thanks in advance for your time,
Owen Lamb

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