Creating a SMuFL font
Posted: 13 Sep 2020, 14:23
As my idea of fun, whilst locked-down with no internet, I decided to take Florian's unfinished "Sebastian" font, and convert it to be SMuFL-compliant.
After a couple of weeks, I now have a functional, but limited font in Dorico, using the Sebastian glyphs. It's been a useful learning experience.
With over 3,500 characters in Bravura, the scale of the task can seem daunting. But a lot are very 'niche'. Also, remember that Bravura is offered on a SIL font licence, so you can copy or modify any glyphs from there. (Your font must then also be released on a SIL licence.) Quite a lot of glyphs are entirely 'geometric' shapes, and there's only so many way that you can draw circles, squares, triangles and lines, etc.
Secondly, within Dorico, various notation elements have their own Font Style, such as Dynamics, Figured Bass, Time Sigs, Chord Symbols, Metronome markings, etc; and you can also assign any glyph from any font to any given symbol.
It's therefore a much simpler task to let Bravura 'fill in the gaps', either in the font or in the program. Conversely, you can produce a SMuFL-compliant font that only has your preferred symbols for dynamics, or figured bass, or even individual noteheads, which you can patch in to a given project, no matter what the music font is set to.
The SMuFL specification is very well documented here: https://w3c.github.io/smufl/gitbook/
The bits about metrics and metadata are the most useful. Then the glyph tables show you want you need to put where.
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Anyway, I've been discussing with Florian about how to collaborate on 'completing' the font (well, as much as we feel is sufficient - Dorico itself doesn't use lots of the glyphs in the standard; November2 has under 2,000 glyphs; MTF-Cadence has over 1,600. I've done 460!)
So if anyone who has experience with making music fonts would like to get involved, do send me a PM. You'll need fontforge, as I think that's the only app for which there's a script to generate the json files.
After a couple of weeks, I now have a functional, but limited font in Dorico, using the Sebastian glyphs. It's been a useful learning experience.
With over 3,500 characters in Bravura, the scale of the task can seem daunting. But a lot are very 'niche'. Also, remember that Bravura is offered on a SIL font licence, so you can copy or modify any glyphs from there. (Your font must then also be released on a SIL licence.) Quite a lot of glyphs are entirely 'geometric' shapes, and there's only so many way that you can draw circles, squares, triangles and lines, etc.
Secondly, within Dorico, various notation elements have their own Font Style, such as Dynamics, Figured Bass, Time Sigs, Chord Symbols, Metronome markings, etc; and you can also assign any glyph from any font to any given symbol.
It's therefore a much simpler task to let Bravura 'fill in the gaps', either in the font or in the program. Conversely, you can produce a SMuFL-compliant font that only has your preferred symbols for dynamics, or figured bass, or even individual noteheads, which you can patch in to a given project, no matter what the music font is set to.
The SMuFL specification is very well documented here: https://w3c.github.io/smufl/gitbook/
The bits about metrics and metadata are the most useful. Then the glyph tables show you want you need to put where.
-----------
Anyway, I've been discussing with Florian about how to collaborate on 'completing' the font (well, as much as we feel is sufficient - Dorico itself doesn't use lots of the glyphs in the standard; November2 has under 2,000 glyphs; MTF-Cadence has over 1,600. I've done 460!)
So if anyone who has experience with making music fonts would like to get involved, do send me a PM. You'll need fontforge, as I think that's the only app for which there's a script to generate the json files.
) 