From: Rick McGowan (rick@unicode.org)
Date: Sat Jan 07 2006 - 14:38:37 CST
Kent & Pupeno...
> Code 2001 has an incomplete set of Musical symbols in the
> 1D100 to 1D16D range, ...
Thanks. I had to uninstall it recently (another story), and hadn't looked
recently at the set of things it has
Kent reported that Michael Good wrote:
> the completeness problem is big enough on its own to discourage
> the commercial creation of Unicode-compliant musical fonts.
Then he (or "they") should be making proposals for adding characters to
Unicode. Using pretty much just Unicode characters, perhaps spread among
several fonts, and the usual drawing tools & layout smarts that
special-purpose music software already has, one should be able to produce
musical scores. I don't see a problem, if the right symbols are in Unicode.
Nobody is stepping up to the bar to request additional musical symbols. If
someone wants to do so, I can help with logistics and review.
And...
> This creates problems when using a lot of today's development
> tools. So moving to Unicode musical symbols would add problems
> without providing significant benefits.
I don't see it. As of now, major tools aren't even remotely close to being
Unicode-ready, and are barely "international" in any sense. I use Finale a
lot myself (Maestro font), and I could think of several instant benefits
if Finale had a Unicode *text* model, even assuming they didn't have the
guts of the *music* processing in Unicode. For starters, I'd be able to
insert lyrics in other languages such as Japanese & Russian, rather than
English and (with difficulty) a few western European languages, and I'd be
able to more easily insert various music *symbols* into text blobs in
scores. And I would be also able to import and export text and lyrics from
other Unicode-capable applications.
Rick
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