Printing Music

[David Webber]

By way of something completely different, rather than showing details of my fonts, I thought I'd show what I actually do with them, and highlight some more unusual problems. My main activity with Font Creator is creating musical symbol fonts for use in actually drawing music. The music image has to be composed of straight lines and bezier curves produced by line-drawing routines in addition to the symbols from the font. These must be placed in a very precise relationship to one another in the drawing plane. This (very much reduced) image illustrates how many of the elements are produced:

EasyRider.png (72.61 KiB) Viewed 5226 times

The note annotated at the bottom - with a note-head from the font, a note-tail from the font, and a stem drawn as a straight line joining them - illustrates one of the main problems: for each musical symbols font the drawing program has to know the exact point on the symbol at which to connect the line. At the moment this data is held in a file - one for each symbols font - to which the program also has access. At this stage I don't know how much of this sort of thing can be achieved with OpenType fonts and ligatures. I plan to explore it - but I suspect not enough.

There are more music font illustrations at http://www.mozart.co.uk/information/illustrations/

David Webber