The Opus family, for example, now has hundreds of glyphs spread over 18 different fonts, but there is almost no overlap with how many of the same symbols are laid out in, say, Maestro or Engraver, the two font families most commonly-used in Finale. There are many instances where this is not possible or practical, but there is a philosophy in its design that will become evident and will allow a user to easily remember the location of most of the characters in the font.įonts that followed in Sonata’s stead, such as Steve Peha’s Petrucci, the first font for Finale, and Jonathan Finn’s Opus, the first font for Sibelius, initially adhered reasonably closely to Sonata’s layout, but pretty quickly they began to diverge as the applications matured, and there was no agreement on how to map additional characters.Īs hundreds of new symbols were added to these font families, and new families were added, there was no standardisation at all. In general, the shift key flips a character upside down, if that makes sense for a given character, and the option key selects the note head equivalent of a note. The treble clef is located on the ampersand key (&), because it resembles an ampersand. Related characters are typically grouped on the same key and are accessed by using the shift, option, and command keys to get related characters.įor instance, the q key is associated with the quarternoteup glyph, Q (or shift-q) with the quarternotedown character, option-q with the quarternotehead character, and so on.
The encoding for Sonata is intended to be easy to use for a person typing… The symbols are typically either visually related to the key to which they are associated, or they are related mnemonically through the actual letter on the keycap. From the Sonata Font Design Specification: Sonata uses a mnemonic approach to mapping. One of the (many) barriers to interoperability between different scoring applications is that there is no agreement on how music fonts should work, beyond a very basic layout that dates back to the introduction of the first music font, Sonata, which was designed nearly 30 years ago by Cleo Huggins ( Adobe. There are two major components to the work: firstly, a proposed new standard for how musical symbols should be laid out in a font, which I have called the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL to its friends, pronounced with a long “u”, so something like “smoofle”) and secondly, a new music font, called Bravura. Today I’m at the Music Encoding Conference in Mainz, Germany, where I am giving a presentation on the work I have been doing over the past several months on music fonts for our new application.
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