Tag: font

Domifare fonts

Solresol can be notated in many ways: solfedge, numbers, notes and via two competing sets of special glyphs. These glyphs are a proposed edition to the unicode standard and part of a set of glyphs known as the CSUR. They’re included in some fonts, like the amazingly ugly Unifoundry includes the more abstract glyphs

      

and Constructium which just has single characters of solfedge

       

(and this is boring, but well-rendered and easy to understand – aside from the duplication of the final syllable as both ‘si’ and ‘ti’.).

Both sets of glyphs above should render in modern web browsers, but allow some time.

Many of my compuer music projects seem to quickly get bogged down in font issues and learning a new script is probably too much to ask of performers (myself included), even if it’s only 8 glyphs. However Constructum is, essentially, a monospace font in the sence that all 4-note words will render the same length, so it’s my likely choice for a display. It is a lot more easy to do than to draw actual music notation.

Like ixilang users type into a dedicated Document window Domifare users will be provided with an auto-transcription of their input. This is enough problem to solve by itself in early versions, but ixi-lang’s page re-writing properties seem like a good plan for later ones.

Fontastic

I’ve got a demo going of the SMuFL font thing here. This is what my style.css looks like:

@font-face {
  font-family: Bravura;
  src: local("Bravura Regular"),
    local("BravuraRegular"), 
    url(Bravura.otf) format("opentype");
}
 
body {
  font-family: Bravura, Sonata, sans-serif; 
}

td {font-size:200%;}

I cheated. Instead of writing the script to generate all the glyphs in javascript, I used sclang because I know it already. This is the code:

i = 0x1D1FF - 0x1D100 + 1;

"<html>".postln;
"<head>".postln;
"<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="style.css">".postln;
"</head>".postln;
"<body>".postln;
"<table border =1 cellpadding =5>".postln;

i.do({|glyph|
 // unicode music section
 glyph = glyph + 0x1D100;
 "<tr><td>%</td><td>&#x%;</td>".postf(glyph.asHexString(5), glyph.asHexString(5));

 // SMuFL extra music char section
 glyph = glyph + 0xE000 - 0x1D100;
 "<td>%</td><td>&#x%;</td>".postf(glyph.asHexString(5), glyph.asHexString(5));
 glyph = glyph + 0xFF;
  "<td>%</td><td>&#x%;</td>".postf(glyph.asHexString(5), glyph.asHexString(5));
 glyph = glyph + 0xFF; 
 "<td>%</td><td>&#x%;</td>".postf(glyph.asHexString(5), glyph.asHexString(5));
 glyph = glyph + 0xFF; 
 "<td>%</td><td>&#x%;</td>".postf(glyph.asHexString(5), glyph.asHexString(5));
 glyph = glyph + 0xFF; 
 "<td>%</td><td>&#x%;</td>".postf(glyph.asHexString(5), glyph.asHexString(5));
 glyph = glyph + 0xFF;
 "<td>%</td><td>&#x%;</td>".postf(glyph.asHexString(5), glyph.asHexString(5));
 glyph = glyph + 0xFF;
 "<td>%</td><td>&#x%;</td>".postf(glyph.asHexString(5), glyph.asHexString(5));
 glyph = glyph + 0xFF;
 "<td>%</td><td>&#x%;</td>".postf(glyph.asHexString(5), glyph.asHexString(5));
 glyph = glyph + 0xFF;
 "<td>%</td><td>&#x%;</td>".postf(glyph.asHexString(5), glyph.asHexString(5));
 glyph = glyph + 0xFF;
 "<td>%</td><td>&#x%;</td>".postf(glyph.asHexString(5), glyph.asHexString(5));
 glyph = glyph + 0xFF;
 "<td>%</td><td>&#x%;</td>".postf(glyph.asHexString(5), glyph.asHexString(5));
 glyph = glyph + 0xFF;
 "<td>%</td><td>&#x%;</td></tr>n".postf(glyph.asHexString(5), glyph.asHexString(5));
});
"</table>".postln;
"</body></html>".postln;
"";

It’s not the nicest code I’ve ever written.
If you click through and see musical stuff at the top of the first two columns, then all is well. If you see non musical stuff, like linux penguins, then the font thing didn’t work. This is what it looks like for me:
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }


Bravura in Firefox, originally uploaded by celesteh.

If you’re getting something really different, if you don’t mind leaving a comment about your browser and operating system? This is supposed to work with internet explorer, so I’m interested in the experiences of Windows users and especially of iPad users.
I mentioned yesterday that I was drawing some influence from Russian art of the revolutionary period. This is a picture of a plate originally designed around then:
.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; }


Supermatist Plate, originally uploaded by celesteh.

It’s got a nice mix of abstract and concrete symbols. Also this google search returns a load of suprematist images. There seems to be a clear relationship between those kinds of images and some of Schaeffer’s colour pieces, which are single page graphic scores.
The next steps for me, aside from getting some javascript skills, are picking which of those many many many musical symbols will be in my palette. I can’t just pick randomly within the range, because some of them would be especially nonsensical (like the MIDI cable ones) and not every glyph is supported.
Also, I still need to pick out some text.

Creative Pact Day 3

So I’m doing the Creative Pact, but I’m a day behind because I didn’t hear about it until September 2nd. My project is to write a vocal piece wth a computer generated score in real time.
I don’t have a lot to report today. I learned some facts:

  • There is a new release of SCMIR
  • It is totally possible to serve fonts across the web for viewing web pages. You use a thing in CSS called @font-face
  • There is a new initiative for standardisation in music fonts called SMuFL (pronounced ‘smooful’). Compliant fonts implement the unicode section for music fonts and then have a bunch of additional musical symbols.
  • The font that ships with LilyPond, Bravura implements SMuFL and looks alright.
  • (The tattoo on my arm is bass clef in the font that shipped with Sibelius 3. What font is that?)

I can’t do a proper demo of this because fonts included in a web page need to be served from the same server as the webpage (at least for firefox users), but this style.css bit sets the font to Bravura for the whole of a webpage:

@font-face {
  font-family: Bravura Regular;
  src: local("Bravura Regular"),
    local("BravuraRegular"), 
    url(Bravura.otf) format("opentype");
}
 
body {
  font-family: Bravura Regular, Sonata, sans-serif; 
}

That uses the local copy of Bravura, if it’s already on your machine, or downloads it if not. If somehow that goes wrong, it uses the Sonata font instead. When I get a chance, I’ll upload a proper demo to my website, doing a table of all the musical symbols. But probably not tomorrow, as I’m going ot have dental surgery in the morning and will probably feel rotten later in the day.