Vertically positioned symbols do not blend well with non-vertically positions ones

[pissalou]

I am developing an educational software and trying to display melodies using BravuraText v1.393. Using staff positioning glyphs, I am able to display notes on a staff properly using only unicode characters thanks to ligatures:



Unicode character sequence : ‘staff5LinesWide’, ‘gClef’, ‘staff5LinesNarrow’, ‘-’, ‘staff5LinesWide’, ‘timeSigCombNumerator’, ‘timeSig4’, ‘timeSigCombDenominator’, ‘timeSig4’, ‘=’, ‘-’, ‘staff5LinesWide’, ‘staffPosLower1’, ‘noteQuarterUp’, ‘=’, ‘-’, ‘staff5LinesWide’, ‘staffPosLower2’, ‘noteQuarterUp’, ‘=’, ‘-’, ‘staff5LinesWide’, ‘staffPosLower3’, ‘noteQuarterUp’, ‘=’, ‘-’, ‘staff5LinesWide’, ‘staffPosLower4’, ‘noteQuarterUp’, ‘=’, ‘-’.

If I change a note in a melody to a B4 (the one note without any positioning glyph in that clef) the notes are not spaced evenly on the horizontal axis anymore and a gap appears between B4 and the next note:

Unicode character sequence: ‘staff5LinesWide’, ‘gClef’, ‘staff5LinesNarrow’, ‘-’, ‘staff5LinesWide’, ‘timeSigCombNumerator’, ‘timeSig4’, ‘timeSigCombDenominator’, ‘timeSig4’, ‘=’, ‘-’, ‘staff5LinesWide’, ‘staffPosLower1’, ‘noteQuarterUp’, ‘=’, ‘-’, ‘staff5LinesWide’, ‘staffPosLower2’, ‘noteQuarterUp’, ‘=’, ‘-’, ‘staff5LinesWide’, ‘noteQuarterUp’, ‘=’, ‘-’, ‘staff5LinesWide’, ‘staffPosLower4’, ‘noteQuarterUp’, ‘=’, ‘-’.
Examples are rendered using the text renderer in Qt 6.5 but I also seen the same behaviour using MS Wordpad.
Is this a limitation, a bug in the ligature tables or just me who missed something in the documentation on how to use those glyphs?

[dspreadbury]

I saw your post on the Dorico forum about this issue. I'm afraid I don't have time to look into this at the moment.

I think it's important to say that in future versions of SMuFL, we plan to deprecate this use case: when we started working on SMuFL, supporting the use case of creating melodic material using only a single font (in the manner of Bach, the musicological font) was identified as an important use case, but in the years since this use case has greatly receded in significance. As you are finding from your efforts to use Bravura Text, actually creating well-spaced melodic material using only font characters is difficult, or perhaps even impossible.

Since you are developing your own application, I would encourage you to investigate one of the existing music notation rendering libraries that exist, and consider targeting that kind of drawing rather than trying to do it yourself using fonts. I believe both Vexflow and Verovio would be excellent candidates for this kind of thing.

In any case, this use case is now effectively deprecated in SMuFL, so it would be suboptimal to continue pouring a lot of development effort into building your music examples this way.

[pissalou]

Thank you for your message, Daniel. I knew that would have to eventually draw over the glyphs (for beaming notes together most obviously) but I wanted to take the font to the maximum extend of its ability first. I will definitely have a look at Verovio, it seems to be the perfect library for what I am trying to achieve. It was an enriching experience trying Bravura and grasping all the complexity of music notation if only while trying to display 4 notes on a staff.