1. Standard Music Font Layout
Music Encoding Conference
23 May 2013
Daniel Spreadbury
2. A brief history of music fonts
• First commercial music font was Sonata from Adobe in
1985
• Features 176 glyphs
• Organised mnemonically on a Latin keyboard (e.g. q =
quarter note)
• Became de facto standard for mapping of music fonts
• Most music fonts since have used largely Sonata-
compatible layouts, e.g. Petrucci (Finale, 1988), Opus
(Sibelius, 1993)
3. A brief history of music fonts
• Perry Roland proposed range of musical
symbols for Unicode in 1998
• Range was approved, with 220 glyphs
• To date, no font has completely implemented
the range
• Only commercial font with a partial
implementation is Adobe Sonata Std,
OpenType update to original Sonata font
4. Problems to be solved
• Sonata’s 170 glyphs are insufficient for the
breadth of symbols used in CMN
• No agreement on how to expand beyond
Sonata’s initial set, hence rapid
divergence…
9. Problems to be solved
• Existing Unicode Musical Symbols range
is also insufficiently broad
• Some scoring applications cannot in any
case access code points beyond Unicode
Plane 0
• Lack of a real standard makes sharing
music fonts between applications difficult
10. So… what is SMuFL?
• A standard way of mapping musical
symbols to the Private Use Area of the
Basic Multilingual Plane in Unicode
• A set of technical guidelines for how music
fonts should be built
11. Goals
• Extensible
Provide a framework that makes it
convenient for additional characters to be
added
• Build a community
Draw on scholarly expertise to minimise
errors and omissions
12. Goals
• Open license
Remove any impediments to font
developers and application vendors
adopting SMuFL
• Practical and useful
Designed with real-world use in mind
13. Non-goals
• Not currently targeting ratification by the Unicode
Consortium
– What to do with the existing Musical Symbols range?
– Some characters are duplicated from other ranges for
convenience; unlikely to be accepted by the
Consortium
• Not targeting use in text-based applications
– Although many characters could be usefully used, it’s
impractical for end users to type characters from the
PUA anyway
14. What’s included
• 59 discrete sub-ranges of symbols
• 808 symbols and counting!
• Includes all 220 glyphs from the Unicode
Musical Symbols range
• Room for expansion by leaving empty
code points between ranges
16. Methodology
• Started with Unicode Musical Symbols range
• Reviewed existing fonts (Sonata, Opus, Petrucci,
Emmentaler, etc.) and categorised additional sub-ranges and
symbols
• Reviewed the standard music notation texts (Gould, Read,
Stone, etc.)
• Reviewed specialist literature (e.g. Ghent conference for
percussion, Salzedo for harp, handbells, accordion, function
symbols, etc.)
• Shared proposals with small group of expert music engravers
and editors
17. Open license
• Released under MIT license
• Steinberg retains copyright, but free for
anybody to use, modify, create derivative
versions, sell, etc.
• ...but we hope to build a community
focused around contributing to
development of SMuFL rather than to see
efforts splinter
18. Next steps
• Establish a governance model to manage
proposed changes and additions
• Fill any identified gaps
• Define mappings for common music fonts to
SMuFL to determine coverage in existing
fonts
• Encourage the development of further
SMuFL-compliant fonts
20. Bravura
• The first SMuFL-compliant font
• Includes all SMuFL characters, and (almost) all
Unicode Musical Symbols characters
• Released under the SIL Open Font License
– Free to use, bundle, embed, create derivative
versions, etc.
– Only licensing restrictions are that the font cannot be
sold on its own; derivative versions cannot use the
same name; and derivative versions must be
released under the same licensing terms
