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Standard Music Font Layout
- 1. Standard Music FontLayout Music Encoding Conference 23 May 2013 Daniel Spreadbury
- 2. A brief historyof music fonts • First commercial music font was Sonata from Adobe in 1985 • Features 176 glyphs • Organised mnemonically on a Latin keyboard (e.g. q = quarter note) • Became de facto standard for mapping of music fonts • Most music fonts since have used largely Sonata- compatible layouts, e.g. Petrucci (Finale, 1988), Opus (Sibelius, 1993)
- 3. A brief historyof music fonts • Perry Roland proposed range of musical symbols for Unicode in 1998 • Range was approved, with 220 glyphs • To date, no font has completely implemented the range • Only commercial font with a partial implementation is Adobe Sonata Std, OpenType update to original Sonata font
- 4. Problems to besolved • Sonata’s 170 glyphs are insufficient for the breadth of symbols used in CMN • No agreement on how to expand beyond Sonata’s initial set, hence rapid divergence…
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- 8. Sonata: a standard? Sonata,compared with Opus and Petrucci (all agree; S & P agree; O & P agree)
- 9. Problems to besolved • Existing Unicode Musical Symbols range is also insufficiently broad • Some scoring applications cannot in any case access code points beyond Unicode Plane 0 • Lack of a real standard makes sharing music fonts between applications difficult
- 10. So… what isSMuFL? • A standard way of mapping musical symbols to the Private Use Area of the Basic Multilingual Plane in Unicode • A set of technical guidelines for how music fonts should be built
- 11. Goals • Extensible Provide aframework that makes it convenient for additional characters to be added • Build a community Draw on scholarly expertise to minimise errors and omissions
- 12. Goals • Open license Removeany impediments to font developers and application vendors adopting SMuFL • Practical and useful Designed with real-world use in mind
- 13. Non-goals • Not currentlytargeting ratification by the Unicode Consortium – What to do with the existing Musical Symbols range? – Some characters are duplicated from other ranges for convenience; unlikely to be accepted by the Consortium • Not targeting use in text-based applications – Although many characters could be usefully used, it’s impractical for end users to type characters from the PUA anyway
- 14. What’s included • 59discrete sub-ranges of symbols • 808 symbols and counting! • Includes all 220 glyphs from the Unicode Musical Symbols range • Room for expansion by leaving empty code points between ranges
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- 16. Methodology • Started withUnicode Musical Symbols range • Reviewed existing fonts (Sonata, Opus, Petrucci, Emmentaler, etc.) and categorised additional sub-ranges and symbols • Reviewed the standard music notation texts (Gould, Read, Stone, etc.) • Reviewed specialist literature (e.g. Ghent conference for percussion, Salzedo for harp, handbells, accordion, function symbols, etc.) • Shared proposals with small group of expert music engravers and editors
- 17. Open license • Releasedunder MIT license • Steinberg retains copyright, but free for anybody to use, modify, create derivative versions, sell, etc. • ...but we hope to build a community focused around contributing to development of SMuFL rather than to see efforts splinter
- 18. Next steps • Establisha governance model to manage proposed changes and additions • Fill any identified gaps • Define mappings for common music fonts to SMuFL to determine coverage in existing fonts • Encourage the development of further SMuFL-compliant fonts
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- 20. Bravura • The firstSMuFL-compliant font • Includes all SMuFL characters, and (almost) all Unicode Musical Symbols characters • Released under the SIL Open Font License – Free to use, bundle, embed, create derivative versions, etc. – Only licensing restrictions are that the font cannot be sold on its own; derivative versions cannot use the same name; and derivative versions must be released under the same licensing terms
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- 22. More information • Pleasejoin the mailing lists! • Pre-release version of Bravura can be downloaded from www.smufl.org/fonts
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