Maestro G Clef

[John Ruggero]

That is already a wonderful job, Knut! I don't think that I will attempt it. (-: You described exactly what I had to do to create my own clef from the Wiener Urtext clef. After this, the smoothing and refining operation by overlaying the original and spiral and oval shapes to the various parts.

To me, this Breitkopf is a beautiful G clef, infinitely better than Maestro and other commercially available clefs. I think that there might be a good market for an extensive collection of old clefs, G, F, and C, Knut. I know that they need to match the font etc. but that could be left to the user.

OCTO. spotted the slight bow to the stem which would make it look even more natural. Perhaps that is a secret of some of these old clefs: no straight lines.

If only all creators of new music fonts would start with a deep knowledge of old fonts, as, I think, you and Wess and others are doing now.

[OCTO]

I have tried to copy what Knut has done, using FontForge but it is really hard! I will not show my result... but yes, I got very inspired by how Knut made it. I have a question: is there any difference between programs when editing vector curves?

[Knut]

That is already a wonderful job, Knut! I don't think that I will attempt it. (-: You described exactly what I had to do to create my own clef from the Wiener Urtext clef. After this, the smoothing and refining operation by overlaying the original and spiral and oval shapes to the various parts.

To me, this Breitkopf is a beautiful G clef, infinitely better than Maestro and other commercially available clefs. I think that there might be a good market for an extensive collection of old clefs, G, F, and C, Knut. I know that they need to match the font etc. but that could be left to the user.

OCTO. spotted the slight bow to the stem which would make it look even more natural. Perhaps that is a secret of some of these old clefs: no straight lines.

If only all creators of new music fonts would start with a deep knowledge of old fonts, as, I think, you and Wess and others are doing now.

Thank you, John.

While there might be a market for old clefs, creating a font only with clef shapes does not seem very useful to me. Nor is it particularly interesting from a design perspective. I would only copy shapes like this in the event of creating an entire music font, trying to make the shape fit into a larger context, so to speak. And while copying the house style of a single publisher is not my thing, I have indeed contemplated creating a 'German' counterpart to the French inspired font I'm currently working on. The Breitkopf treble clef is certainly a good candidate for this concept, particularly because it's quite different from the one in my current project. Such a font is pretty far into the future, though, as I haven't even finished the first one.

With regard to a slight curve in the vertical projection of the Breitkopf clef, it seems really straight to me, except for at the bottom. My guess is that the line is straight in the punch, but that it comes across as slightly curvy because of distortion in the engraving, printing or scanning process. Even though you might manage to convey such very marginal curves in the finished glyph, I don't know if they would come across favourably in print.

I have a question: is there any difference between programs when editing vector curves?

There might be differences in the functionality of the tools available in the application used to create them, but otherwise vectors are vectors.

[tisimst]

Yes, nicely done Knut!

Whenever I need to do this (and I have done it many times), I never worry about vectorizing the actual bitmap at all. In Inkscape, I import the bitmap as an embedded image, lock that layer, and then manually add the outline curves on another layer. These curves I then import into FontForge. For me, this has worked very nicely.

[John Ruggero]

Thanks so much for that tip, tisimst! I will try that system out, as well, next time around. I think it might be more like drawing than sculpting.

[Knut]

Yes, nicely done Knut!

Whenever I need to do this (and I have done it many times), I never worry about vectorizing the actual bitmap at all. In Inkscape, I import the bitmap as an embedded image, lock that layer, and then manually add the outline curves on another layer. These curves I then import into FontForge. For me, this has worked very nicely.

Thanks for the tip. I haven't done much tracing, and I use FontLab more or less exclusively to design fonts, so it seemed like the best way to do it. Your method is surely a lot cleaner, but unfortunately rendering of bit map backgrounds in FL are pretty bad, so it may not be an option when not designing in illustrator.

[jrethorst]

> Music fonts aren't generally done by professional font designers

Maybe this is why IMHO (very H), there's never been a music font as nice as Sonata, done for Adobe by Cleo Huggins. The G clef, which looks much like the Breitkopf clef above, is poetry and everything else just looks right.

[MJCube]

there's never been a music font as nice as Sonata

You are the first person (after me) I’ve heard praise Sonata this way! I agree, the difference in professionalism of glyph design has always been quite noticeable to me.

[John Ruggero]

John ad MJCube, I see Sonata various places for free, and I like what I see. Are these OK to download and what version would you recommend?

[tisimst]

There are numerous things that I don't love about Sonata, but overall I'd have to agree with you about the general construction, in that many (notice I didn't say "all") of the common curve "artifacts" seem to have been taken care of, while many other music fonts are plagued with them.