Dear Jakub, > I've seen discussions from last year about adding nabc support to > gregorio, has there been any progress on it since then?
There has been some progress but nothing visible yet: first, did you see the two St Gall fonts that were open-sourced? Also, I've made arrangements to be able to work on this full time during a few weeks this autumn, so it will speed up at that time! > I've tried to create neumatic font from St. Gall family MSS, so far > it is very rough, haven't spent any time on spacing, kerning, > vertical sizes etc. and many glyphs need to be improved. This is a very impressive job, and this will be extremely helpful! > Also, I'm still missing about 29 glyphs from Cardine's Gregorian > Semiology pp12-13, Hmm, I don't see many glyphs pp12-13 but we might not have the same edition, are you talking about the big table? > on the other side have some glyphs not listed in that table and some > most common combined glyphs, plus 45 alphabetic glyphs. Great! > I've uploaded what I have so far to > http://people.redhat.com/jakub/gregall/ gregall.sfd is the fontforge > font source including background pictures, gregall.ttf the generated > TrueType font, gregall.pdf a short document containing a WIP table > with the glyphs, MSS pictures, small and larger glyphs and details > from where in the manuscripts I've taken each glyph. The font is > right now GPLed, Thank you! > am not opposing to other reasonable license. I tend to prefer OFL for fonts, but it's a detail... > First of all, I'd like to know if what I've done so far could be > useful for gregorio at all, For sure! > and if yes, would appreciate any advices or help (hints where to find > missing glyphs in the MSS I might not be the best person to ask this... Does anyone on the list have an idea? The only advise I could tell would be to subscribe and ask on http://gregorian-chant.ning.com/ Or, it might be obvious, but did you check the volumes of Paléographie Musicale? Many are on archive.org. > , which of the glyphs look too ugly and need to be improved and how, Again, I might not be the best person to ask this... Maybe Henry or Sr Maria? > perhaps help with improving the shape of some glyphs, what to do with > character spacing and kerning, This is no obvious question... My first guess would be the following: - leaving a small space before and after, same for all glyphs - kerning if you have time but don't spend too much time on it, as it will be handled by Gregorio in the case of square+St Gall neumes alignment... do you see what I mean? It's highly possible that Gregorio won't use these kernings and make its own. > if each glyph should be repeated for each base pitch (perhaps using > some fontforge script?). No need for that, this will be handled by Gregorio too (well, TeX actually, to be more precise). But for things like subpuncta and prepuncta, see below. Thinking back about this, there might be a reason why you would want to do this, it's if you want your font to be useable outside Gregorio. For instance Gregoria and Grecilia are useable outside Gregorio. The good thing is that you don't have to use a TeX system, the bad thing is that it requires quite a lot of work and tricks in the font, and that the result will never be as good: in TeX you can basically do whatever you want, the only limit is you imagination, while OTF fonts obviously don't allow that... > Also, I'm not 100% sure about all the shapes I found so far, e.g. the > difference between normal and liquescens oriscus, and in the pdf > there are several glyph equivalences I'm assuming (= sign in the > descriptions), but am not sure about. Can someone on the list check that? > As for the nabc language: > http://www.gregoriochant.org/dokuwiki/doku.php/gregowiki:language I'm > wondering: 1) if there shouldn't be a separate two letter type for > pressus maior vs. pressus minor 2) perhaps similarly for the 3 vs. 2 > arcs quilisma Why not, but as I've been forgetting many things since last year, can you elaborate a bit why? > 3) I wonder if there shouldn't be syntax for adding prepuncta as > well, not just subpuncta Indeed, this would be good! > 4) for subpuncta (and prepuncta), it would be nice to be able to > specify the shape individually, punctum vs. tractulus vs. tractulus > with episema vs. tractulus with episema on both sides vs. stropha > liquescens, This would be necessary indeed, thanks! > perhaps with special glyphs in the font for the common combination of > the subpunctis or prepunctis that would have proper kerning against > most commonly subpunctized or prepunctized neumes Well, I haven't studied the question enough, but what I would instinctively do is to make some precomposed glyphs for most commons subpunctis and prepunctis combinations... and let Gregorio handle special cases. What do you think? > 5) as I found far more ls:XXX kinds than the current wiki has, > perhaps it would be nice to extend the table It would be good indeed, do you have an account on the wiki with write access? If so, do not hesitate to modify it with new proposals! Thank you very much! -- Elie _______________________________________________ Gregorio-users mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/gregorio-users
