On 23 Oct 2006 at 20:46, Noel Stoutenburg wrote: > David W. Fenton wrote: > > Well, it seems to me that except for the 1 it's not distorting the > > natural shapes to much to make them the same width. Most of them fit > > into the same oval as a zero. > > As I understand the creation of cast type, though, the thoughts go > differently: first, a rectangular type body of the necessary length > and width is created to accommodate the width and length of the oval > of the zero, and that all of the other numerals will fit within this > same rectangle. Of the numerals, the only one which might fit on a > rectangle of thinner dimensions is the "1", and I suspect that the > historical type founders put the 1 on the same width body as the other > numerals.
Then it would have printed as fixed-width when used inline. If it took up less space in print, they had to have one that *wasn't* as wide as the other numbers. Either they had two different 1s, or they packed lead (there's a name for that which escapes me; leding only refers to vertical inline spacing, no?) in between to space the 1s that needed to be wider. > With respect to > > > But for a long time the practical restriction was 128, > > I would suggest that although it was not a "restriction", for a longer > time before that, Well, it was a restriction *on the computer*, one that goes back to the earliest days of character encoding on computers. > the typical number of characters in a font was less > than 128, probably around 100, which is about the number of characters > in the set of 128, when one remembers that 32 slots were reserved for > control characters. Teletype used about the same number, and probably > the same constituent characters as contained in a typical metal type > distribution. Now, a printer with sufficient resources would have > been able to come up with the other items included in the 128 > characters in the font extensions, and an amazing number of other > items, he would not have considered a font of text type; some of the > items we consider part of a font today, for example ©, ®, and ¶ would > have been part of a symbols set; and numerals for superscripts would > probably have been drawn from a regular font of smaller types. Thus I > don't consider 255 characters as a "restriction" or limitation. All of this applies only to monolingual texts. Yes, there are enough spaces to handle any single language, but if you need more than one language, then you're out of luck. And many of the characters needed were put in the upper 128. But there are not enough places to handle all the single letters, let alone having the appropriate ligatures, variant numerals and so forth. That's why the typographical niceties were ommited. If our character sets were 512 characters, this would probably not be the case, but that would be 9-bit, which never would have happened. [] > With respect to the implications of this for Finale, and your comments > from an earlier post in the thread, where you wrote in part: > > > And we're still struggling with the 256-character limit in Finale > > because music fonts are still limited to that. > > > > I wonder how long it will be before we transition over to full > > Unicode font sets in everything? > > What is overlooked in much of this is that with a few exceptions, > Finale is not really limited to 256 characters in a set of music > types. Huh? You can certainly use multiple fonts, but Finale doesn't reflect anything but the lower 256 characters (0-255 in the character dialog). Try creating an articulation using a font with more than 256 characters and using any of the characters above place 256 -- in Finale, you can't do it. > Both of the latter two Finale music fonts, Maestro and > Engraver are spread across two fonts in a way which is transparent to > the casual user. I often have 4 or 5 music fonts in use (Maestro, Fughetta, Toccatta, Bach, etc.) in one piece. It's *not* transparent at all for many things, because you have to know which font has which characters in it. > The easiest example of this is presently in clefs: > if you don't like the choices available in Petrucci, Maestro, or > engraver, it is trivially simple to obtain a copy of Matthew Hindson's > "Clefs" font, and map to the one you want; and if you don't like any > of those either, and have the time and knowledge, you can create your > own clefs font, and point to that. Again, with a very few exceptions > (the character apparently hard-coded into Finale to be used in the > case of melismatic syllables--the hyphen--is the only one which comes > to my mind, but I assume that there are one or two that are escaping > my recall at the moment) Finale gives more flexibility in what > characters are assigned for what use than any other package with which > I am familiar. The music font should be a single font, with all the choices you'd ever need. That would mean it would be much larger than 256 characters. This would also make it possible to have the text font included in the main music font. And it would require a complete rewrite of much of Finale. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
