Notehead confusion

teacue · March 17, 2019, 5:01pm

Edit:
In the meantime I realized that I made a mistake in my original post.
I edit my post accordingly.

Here is something confusing.
I use a font that I converted to SMuFL.
The notehead does not look right when I use the Engraving Option for Notehead design “Larger noteheads”.

With the option “Default size noteheads” the notehead is right but the stems up are not placed correctly.
With the option “Larger Noteheads” the stems up are correct but Dorico seems to revert to Bravura notehead (the notehead in the converted font does not have such a pronounced angle)
What is happening here?

I thinks I have the appropriate glyphs:
“noteheadBlack” at U+E0A4
and “noteheadBlackOversized” at U+F4BE (uniE0A4.ss05)

In the attached picture you can see on the left what happens when I choose the “Default size noteheads” and on the right what happens when I choose option “Larger Noteheads”.

Edit:
I tried with uniE04.ss01 but it’s the same result.

BTW it seems that there is some confusion about the unicode for these alternates.
@ https://w3c.github.io/smufl/gitbook/tables/noteheads.html
it says uniE0A4.salt02 for oversized, but the code is false in the last Bravura version, it should be as ending either .ss01 or .ss05

dspreadbury · March 18, 2019, 12:04am

Did you check the stem attachment points for your edited notehead in the Engrave > Notehead Sets dialog?

teacue · March 18, 2019, 9:21am

Thanks for your answer.

1. The up stem question
I followed your advice and edited the Stem attachment points in the Noteheads Sets dialog (Stem up SE) and indeed the stem up can be pushed to the correct place.
Thank you for pointing me to this.

But now this leads me to another question:
After editing, two red triangles appear at the top of the notehead tab for noteheadBlack and noteheadHalf (though I did not edited noteheadHalf).
These triangles seem to show that Dorico notices that I have edited something.
When I revert to Bravura I notice that the stem values revert back too, but the red triangles stay.
Changing again to the other SMuFL font, the stem values keep the default values.
Dorico did not remember these edits.
Where can these values be stored? I do not see anything for this in the Engraving Defaults of the metadata file.
If they cannot be stored, does it mean that each time I change a music font I have to edit these values?
I am not talking about editing a notehead in the Edit Noteheads editor but about using a complete new SMuFL music font.
Until now I did not encounter this problem because I did not use a SMuFL font with much wider noteheads than Bravura, so probably the default stem attachment values worked!
But I can’t imagine that it should be manually edited in Dorico for each font!

2. The notehead question
Today Dorico behaved at first in the same way as yesterday, meaning that when I changed the Default size to larger size it reverted to the Bravura notehead.
But, after editing the Stem attachment points for some reason Dorico did not revert to the Bravura notehead,
although I am not sure which nothead it used because there was no change I could notice, but it was definitively the notehead of the edited font.
(see some comments on this in the last paragraph)

BTW this behaviour was reproducible.
I closed Dorico
started again and changed the music font from Bravura to my edited SMuFL font
Dorico uses the notehead of the new font, everything seems ok except the stem up thing
I Change the notehead size to larger size
Now Dorico reverts to the Bravura notehead
I go back to default size notehead
Edit the stems attachment values
Change again to notehead larger size
Dorico does not revert to Bravura notehead but shows the notehead of the new font

What is happening here?

3. The notehead naming question
The fact that in the above situation Dorico did not revert to the Bravura notehead, used the notehead of the new font but it stayed at the same size as the default size may have to do with the fact that in this testing phase I use the following mapping:
e0a4 for noteheadBlack
f46a for noteblackOversized
f4be for noteheadBlack - again, because I wanted to test as I simply do not understand what is what!

This leads me to the next question:
Considering the width of Bravuras glyphs I find it at the moment rather confusing to know/understand what is what
The width of U+E0A4 is 295
The width of U+F46A (uniE0A4.ss01) is 352
The width of U+F4BE (uniE0A4.ss05) is 329
According to these values one could believe that
U+E0A4 is “noteheadBlackSmall”
uniE0A4.ss05 is “noteheadBlack”
uniE0A4.ss01 is noteheadBlackOversized

But I have the feeling that it is not so.
The difficulty for me is that in the official glyph table as seen here:
https://w3c.github.io/smufl/gitbook/tables/noteheads.html
the glyphs have their real name but invalid unicodes:
uniE0A4.salt02 for noteheadBlackOversized
uniE0A4.salt01 for noteheadBlackSmall

Theoretically there should be no confusion about U+E0A4 which is clearly for “noteheadBlack” but having a look at the width of the three available glyphs in Bravura I find it curious that the small nothead is wider than the default notehead.

Daniel, I would be really glad if you could tell exactly the exact corresponding unicodes for the glyphs.
(I did not mentioned the whole- half- and doublewhole noteheads but it is the same question)

teacue · March 22, 2019, 5:12pm

In the meantime I found out the solution for the stems up not being correctly attached.
Of course Daniel’s answer pointing to the possibility to edit this in the Noteheads Set Edit menu is one way
but this is something the user of a font should not have to do manually and indeed this setting can be set in the json metadata file.

The setting has to be made in the “glyphsWithAnchors” chapter and for the appropriate notehead.
BTW all the parameter found in the Edit Notehead Set editor are read from the metadata file (of course if the metadata file has these values!)
After inserting the appropriate values in the metadata file the stems up appear correctly.

I still have a problem!
There is still a false placement when a half note stem down shares a stem with a 1/8 note stem up.
I could not find the right setting!

teacue · March 24, 2019, 8:55pm

In the meantime, after some tedious tests, I was able to find out exactly which parts of the metadata are necessary for Dorico to recognize the oversized noteheads:
These are “sets” and “optionalGlyphs”.
I found it out using the “complete” Bravura metadata file that I just renamed for the font I was testing.

Using the Bravura metadata file, Dorico was able to recognize the oversized noteheads
I deleted one after another some metadata parts, and after deleting “glyphsWithAnchors”, “glyphsWithAlternates”, “glyphBoxes” and “ligatures”
Dorico could still recognize the oversized noteheads.
This is only as I deleted “sets” or “optionalGlyphs” that Dorico could not recognize the oversized noteheads anymore and instead, reverted to Bravuras noteheads.
I created a minimalistic metadata file with only the values for the “ss05” set (the one for the oversized noteheads) and the optionalGlyphs values only for noteheadBlackOversized, half and whole.
And it worked, Dorico showed the oversized noteheads without reverting to Bravura

Now I am really glad that I finally know which metadata Dorico needs for this case!
On the other side I just wonder how many pitfalls I will still encounter