Re: SMuFL

[Andrew Bernard]

Greetings List,

There's an old IT joke that the beauty of having standards is that there 
are so many to choose from!

I agree with Shane. The SMuFL standard is just a specification cooked up 
by Steinberg for the new program. It's been possible for them to 
consider this since they are architecting the program from scratch. But 
it's a step away and outside of the hugely important work the Unicode 
Consortium have been doing for decades. No matter how clever SMuFL is, 
it's not well conceived philosophically for this reason. Lilyponders 
would be better off devoting time to working with the Unicode 
Consortium. Then a music glyph standard would truly have universal 
acceptance, due to the international respect Unicode has.

Unicode already has a Symbols area and the 6.2 standard provides a lot 
of glyphs. As a person involved with 18c harpsichord music myself, I 
note that they provide the glyphs to do pretty much all the 18c 
ornaments, which can be built up from parts. So the Unicode Consortium 
is certainly serious about music aspects.

Andrew


On 10/08/13 1:47 AM, Shane Brandes wrote:
> SMuFL has nothing much to do with preserving the Unicode standard. If
> you can get the Unicode consortium to participate in outlining SMuFL
> stuffs in its standard than it would be good, but an abstracted
> standard used by one or two applications is a bad idea especially for
> one text based like ours. It reduces the odds of universal support
> that the Unicode consortium is trying to create. We don't need such an
> extra layer of confusion. We just need to apply pressure to the
> consortium to get the things that are missing encoded. That is my
> stance.
>
> Shane