From: John Hudson (john@tiro.ca)
Date: Thu Jun 15 2006 - 02:58:50 CDT
Petr Tomasek wrote:
>>There are obvious cases in which tying marks should be handled at some
>>level above text encoding and typical font shaping, e.g. in music notation,
> Why couldn't be (theoreticaly) music notation handled in unicode?
The input and storage for many entities in musical notation could be Unicode -- indeed,
I'm aware of one music composition software that hacks the Unicode Greek block for musical
entities. But there are also aspects of music layout, in particular drawn entities such as
ties, dynamics marking, etc. that go well beyond the kind of rendering and layout
architecture we have built for text encoding. I suspect software that uses some form of
character encoding as a basis for music notation does so because fonts happen to be a
convenient storage and access medium for little graphic symbols, and character encoding is
how you get at the symbols in the fonts. But only some of the symbols used in music
notation are conveniently handled in this way. For example, note heads might be
conveniently encoded and accessed as glyphs in a font, but the length of the stem attached
to the notehead vary, and the bars that connect the stems of adjacent eighth, sixteenth
notes etc. need to be dynamically drawn, as do ties between notes. None of these things
can be handled in a text encoding and font paradigm.
John Hudson
-- Tiro Typeworks www.tiro.com Vancouver, BC john@tiro.ca I am not yet so lost in lexicography, as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of heaven. - Samuel Johnson
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