Re: GSoC 2020 update, June 19

[Werner LEMBERG]

Hello Owen,


thanks a lot for your detailed summary.

> This week, I corresponded with Daniel Spreadbury on the W3C Music
> Notation Community Group public email list and Behdad Esfahbod on
> the HarfBuzz mailing list, and received some clarifications on how
> to continue.  It looks like we won't need to add OpenType support!
> Instead, we only have to take information from a SMuFL font's
> metadata.json.

Sounds good.  It's still a pity that they didn't decide to add a
SMuFL-specific SFNT table to the font...

> Another thing I have been considering is how to package the
> Emmentaler font. Daniel Spreadbury said that it would be feasible to
> make both variants of Emmentaler (music and text, as per SMuFL
> specs) parts of an OpenType Collection, as Werner suggested, but
> that does not include all the design size variants Emmentaler
> already has. If it were possible to package all of these together in
> a single OTC (I'd just have to figure out a good way to organize
> them; perhaps FontForge's font.design_size property could be used?),
> that may reduce file clutter as well, causing less hassle moving the
> whole font family around.

Having a single OTC for all optical sizes and both text and music
fonts certainly makes sense.

> However, I'm not sure whether that will work, since, as far as I can
> tell, each design size will need its own metadata file due to their
> different line thicknesses.

This shouldn't be a problem.  All font-specific JSON files contain the
`fontName` keyword, making it easy to have a bunch of JSON files where
each is associated with a single subfont of an OpenType collection.


    Werner