>> ...I have occasionally thought about implementing an ABC-to-solfa
>> translator. The bit I don't have a tool to do is a solfa font...
> Showing my ignorance here, but wouldn't any non-proportional font do,
> such as Courier?
The octaving signs are the main problem; the lower one doesn't occur
in ASCII (it has to be distinguished from a comma, which is used like
a dot in staff notation) and both are kerned so as to take up no
horizontal space. In Curwen's work the upper octave is also distinct
from the single-quote sign, which is used as a staccato mark. One way
to do this would be to have three copies of the lower-case alphabet:
normal, lower-octave and upper-octave. (Curwen goes beyond that into
double-octave signs, but there can't be much vocal music intended for
human beings that ranges so far).
The letter forms of solfa are usually Courier-like, but Curwen's own
book uses space-squeezing to place the beats evenly, regardless of how
many notes there are on the line, so a fixed-width font wouldn't work.
Gaelic songbooks tend not to do this, as far as I can tell, but they
usually don't have as many notes per line either. Sometimes you find
the chromatic modifiers printed smaller, so that "se" takes up the
same horizontal spce as "s".
There is a less important issue with boldness. Solfa is usually set
bold, with the "punctuation" signs even bolder. When you make Courier
bold (at least on the Mac) the punctuation isn't noticeably bolded at
all. Some other things are different sizes in solfa, notably the bar
line, which is bigger than a | sign in Courier.
I don't think we have any solfa users on this list. I'll try to pick
a Gaelic singer pal's brains next weekend and find out what she think's
important about the appearance of the score. She also has very poor
eyesight, which means she'll have stricter criteria of readability.
=================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> ===================
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