Re: Music glyph design choices

[Simon Albrecht]

Am 10.08.2015 um 22:10 schrieb tisimst:
> Yes and no. I don't feel super comfortable putting together an official
> .PATCH, but I can definitely post my proposed changes or send updated
> files to anyone who has more experience getting these officially in the
> assembly line. FWIW I took the liberty to play around with the code that
> creates the double flat glyph and here's what I have that we can talk
> about if anyone cares to chime in.
>
> First, the double flat. In the following image, you'll see three glyphs
> in the right. From the top, we see the current glyph, with the left
> flat's width = 0.7 and the right flat's width = 0.8. Next down shows
> what would happen if we averaged the widths of the two flats, which
> keeps the overall width of the glyph the same as the current one. The
> bottom glyph is composed of exact copies of the flat glyph with an
> appropriate overlap, to me at least, based on real scores I've seen. The
> only "downside" I can see is that it becomes a _little_ wider than the
> other two. Personally, I think this is going to have a minimal spacing
> effect on most scores since its usage isn't nearly as common as the flat is.
I’d vote for the second version, especially in the light of issues like 
https://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2142 and 
https://code.google.com/p/lilypond/issues/detail?id=2203. LGTM.
> Thankfully it's just a matter of setting these variables in the glyph's
> MF code (except for "width", which is calculated).
What an amazing feat, isn’t it?
>   The "crook" value is
> multiplied by "staff_space". The flatflat.slash glyph should probably be
> changed to be the same.
>
> BTW, if it isn't obvious from the picture, the "overlap" variable is how
> much the left flat's right-most bound overlaps the right flat's origin
> (the blue line), so even overlap=0 will have some real overlap because
> the flat glyph's left-most bound isn't at x=0.
>
> Second, changing the prallup and pralldown glyphs according to my
> previous suggestions would also quite easy, if that were agreed upon.
> This is done by simply changing the order of the glyphs in
> feta-trills.mf to be
>
> prallprall
> prallmordent
> upprall
> upmordent
> prallup*
> downprall
> downmordent
> pralldown*
> lineprall
>
> (* i.e., just swap the prallup and pralldown places) and adding
> "currentpicture := currentpicture yscaled -1;" at the end of both
> prallup and pralldown definitions, the thick and thin parts of the
> zig-zags are then consistent across all of them. I don't have any
> historical proof to back my proposals for these two glyphs. It just
> seems "right" to make them consistent with the rest of them.
Same for me: I think these are extremely rare in use. However, IIUC the 
difference between thick and thin lines historically originates from 
writing with a quill, and there is no reason to turn the quill when 
writing a prallup as opposed to an upprall. Thus I fully second this 
improvement.

Yours, Simon