NOTATIO

I've been working with Florian's Nepomuk text fonts, which, like Ionian and Octo's own Old Music Standard, are designed to match the punched text often found on 20th century plate engraving.

I've tightened up the Tracking and Kerning, which makes the Regular face much more suitable for lyrics (and as in the example, letter spacing adjustments can be made for titling); and created a Bold and Bold Italic.

As my idea of fun, I've tried to 'match' a Durand score. Not an exact copy, mind. I've overlooked some of their peculiarities, such as the absurd Tenor clef, stem directions, and the barring between staves. It's more an exercise in getting a 'look' - and possibly improving on the original.
The full PDF is here: The original is here:
https://s9.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usim ... (SATB).pdf

Durand uses flat slurs for long phrase slurs, and curved ones for short melismas. Dorico's not great at handling the 'second half' of a flat slur over the system break, but it can be adjusted.

Dorico could easily have accommodated the music on 3 pages instead of 4, but matching the original layout was the plan. It is nice to have some decent margins on a page, but it's rarely practicable on A4...

If anyone wants to try out the fonts, you can find them here. I've added loads of additional characters -- diacritics, currency symbols, non-breaking hyphens, Unicode accidentals, and other things likely to be of use.

https://github.com/benwiggy/nepomuk

It's beautiful, Ben. Great job. Just one very small thing so you know I looked very carefully: to me, the mf>P appears to be dissociated from the tenor part. If the slur were brought closer to the first note head, it could be moved down a little.

Thanks, John. Noted. It's a bit tricky with flat slurs when they need to ride over a 'bump' like a tuplet numeral.

I've been working on the fonts all yesterday, getting the diacritics and kerning more organized within the font documents, improving the 'emboldening', smoothing out rough edges, and making sure all the styles have the same glyphs. It's coming along nicely.

This is great work, Ben! I noticed that the "boldness" of the pngs in the documentation on GitHub was bolder... is that a new version of Sebastian or is it an artifact of the png raster?

err... Bolder than what..?

I created the Bold fonts entirely; they're essentially 'thickenings' of the Regular and Italic styles, with a bit of tidying up. I've worked on them a bit more since I made the PNGs -- so the fonts should be slightly bolder now than in the PNGs.

They're just bold enough to give a bit of extra contrast and heft in titles and Tempo marks, but they're not Ultra Black.

I did make the staff lines a bit heavier, to match the old scores I was copying, if that's what you mean.

I'm still doing a bit of tweaking to the kerning -- discovering more pairs that are too far apart -- and improving some of the additional glyphs. I also have some more ambitious ideas about small caps and Greek letters...

Great work benwiggy! Nepomuk pairs beautifully with MTF Cadence and Beethoven, both currently in use in my engraving.

I'd been meaning to take a look at “fixing” Nepomuk for a long time, but kept putting it off. Your update inspired me to take it and sit down to add some changes of my own for my scores (mostly some kerning the regular lowercases and adding Roman numerals for barré).

I was kind of irresponsible in not taking note of the changes I made, but if you think it could be of use to you, I can share my version.


Also, hi to everyone! Long-time lurker, I've learned a lot from watching the pros in here. Hope to be able to add something of worth to the discussions

Quirquincho wrote: ↑15 Apr 2022, 20:42 (mostly some kerning the regular lowercases and adding Roman numerals for barré).

I've been working on catching and improving the kerning for a few days, and now have a v2.01 release available. Also Small Caps!

I could add the Roman Numerals very easily: do you mean in their Unicode text positions, or in SMuFL? I suppose useful SMuFL symbols for a text font should be the next thing.

I've 'forked' Greek, Cyrillic and IPA symbols from the main font file, as a longer-term project....

I just checked your new version… Beautiful work, it's improved a lot!
Would appreciate a lot if you can do your take on roman numerals (I simply c&p the I,V, and X shapes, made some adjustments to the serifs' heights and merged them).
Unicode's position preferably, since Sibelius doesn't support SMuFL yet -_- (setting up the MTF fonts has been a PITA).

Btw, a small mistake on the footer of your pdf: it says pour correspondre à la l'original. The la shouldn't be there.

/EDIT One curiosity: In French, one places a space before every punctuation sign comprised of two elements, thus the title should look like
Dieu ! qu’il la fait bon regarder !
However, the original doesn't respect this rule. Perhaps it hadn't been standardized yet at the time? I'm not sure where to look for that kind of information, but it's an interesting choice to make as an editor, whether to modernize that kind of stuff or not.
Debussy's setting of the lyrics is rather irregular on itself on the M.S., missing the exclamation marks on the first instance after la fait bon regarder, but not afterwards. Perhaps and oversight? In any case, Durand respected that elision.

OK, will add the Roman letters. I also have some more kerning adjustments!

Thanks for the French correction. My schoolboy French is in need of some work.

The Durand publication is known to have several misprints, but I'm trying to find out what they are!

I think I'll keep the look of the original, though.