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Re: SMuFL


From: Carl Peterson
Subject: Re: SMuFL
Date: Sat, 10 Aug 2013 00:43:17 -0400

On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 12:21 AM, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:

> 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.

I disagree, and I think that you are completely missing the purpose of
SMuFL: It collects *glyphs* which are used somewhere, and which people
need somehow.  Compare this to the Adobe Glyph Collections like
`Adobe-Korea1-2' or `Adobe-GB1-5'.  As they write on smufl.org:

  The goal of SMuFL is to establish a new standard glyph mapping for
  musical symbols that is optimised for OpenType fonts and that can be
  adopted by a variety of software vendors and font designers, for the
  benefit of all users of music notation software.

Unicode is a *character* standard, mainly to *exchange* information.
It is *not* related to glyphs, or to fonts.  The SMuFL team correctly
maps the glyphs to the Private Area of Unicode, and they don't suggest
the inclusion of any of those entities into the Unicode standard.

Whether SmuFL is centered on Steinberg's new program is basically
completely irrelevant.  I'm quite sure that they are willing to add
glyphs which Lilypond needs and which aren't covered yet.  Not that
this is really necessary, as far as I can see...


    Werner

The distinction I'm seeing is that the Unicode Standard and SMuFL are two layers of standardization. What I see is that Unicode tells us what the glyphs mean, (so that we use the same code point in the font to refer to the same thing). SMuFL, on the other hand, tells us how to draw and scale those glyphs so that they can be handled the same way regardless of the actual font.

The concern I have on SMuFL is that it is an as-of-yet immature standard without broad support outside of Steinberg. If we start working on SMuFL specifically, will the SMuFL standard look the same when we get done as it does now? Will it be a futile effort because the SMuFL standard dies from lack of interest/acceptance?

Carl

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