[4 new] Expansion: Musical notes (U+2669–U+266C)

These notes (♩♪♫♬) are part of the Miscellaneous Symbols block:

  http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2600.pdf

This block will be filled out by the community; perhaps you could assist by helping to design these four glyphs? This should harmonise with the existing Ubuntu Font Family character set, and copyright-assigned before it can be accepted.

I'm trying to get FontForge to cooperate with me, but I had an idea on how to design U+266A: take the digit '1', reverse it, and then overlay 'bullet' in its lower-left corner.

Cody: you may find it easier to work in Inkscape. Write some text rendered in the Ubuntu Font Family; then:

  1. Path->Path to Object
  2. Object->Ungroup

and then play with these shapes. Attached is the svg file I used for experimenting with variations on the Greek letter nu, and you might find it useful to use a template.

I ended up creating a mockup of U+266A in Illustrator (yes, I know, I'm a bad OSS dev, but I'm more familiar with it than Inkscape); here it is.

Excellent! Could you have a go at designing all four musical glyphs together; which will help to keep them in harmony with each other, and will help to flag up any proportions that don't work when the notes are doubled up. Might also be worth experimenting with some variety in the bowl; the lowercase 'o' is not actually round.

After tweaking about some more, I came up with this version, which has the top lining up with '1' and the bottom lining up with 'o'.

Still working on the other notes, but I've further improved U+266A by using the outline of the 'o' rather than a pure circle for the the head of the note.

The hardest ones are going to be the double notes - I'm going to have to extend the beam so that the second note will fit, and my attempts thus far have been... awkward.

Cody: Yup, you're now discovering why all four need designing at the same time! You'll probably have to go can and redesign/tweak the first and you find out the issues with the third or forth glyph! Keep experimenting, also, keep several designs for which, so you can show them at the end and people can pick which they think works best. For example, see Rodrigo Rivas' designs for the Indian Rupee Sign that is now in UFF v0.69:

  http://launchpadlibrarian.net/56544753/rupee_proposal.svg

This has several variations, along with existing characters as a guide, and the various lines to show how the glyph fits compared to the baseline/cap-height/x-height.

Cody: try starting from 'ƪ' (U+01AA, Reversed Esh Loop), if you mirror this vertically, and remove the centre, the weighting is fairly close to what you're after; I don't think that there is much solid in the font to use as a guide ('¶' is about the only example), and doesn't seem to make an attract note!

Almost the same forms appearing 'ȡȴȵȶ'; (mirrored); this time and ~10% bigger if that's a help.

For the tail on the quaver can be quite long, perhaps try the tails from 'Ƭ' or 'Ư', or the mirrored bottom half the now beautiful slender *italic* 'f', the hooked diagonal from from 'Ӽӽ':

Quick copy and paste: ƪ¶ȡȴȵȶƬƯӼӽ (Regular) + f (italic).

U+01AA is a good start for the head and stem; however, I'm still trying to find a good character to borrow for the flag. Ӽӽ are great, but they're not actually in the Ubuntu font-- those are from DejaVu. Italic f is close, but even it will take some tweaking.

OK, here's another attempt with all four notes, using U+01AA, U+01AC, minus and equal:

Could you try to produce something like with this attachment, so that it's possible to see the context and how you would position the characters compared to the baseline/cap/ascender heights. I've put the four glyphs onto the same surface here, and nudged the second bar of the semiquavers to align with the cut-mark used on the 'f'.

If you copy and paste this several times down the page, it would be possible to try around variations (such as changing the note-position between the two notes to create more of a diagonal.

Cody: This is getting close enough to worry about the formalities or merging/accepting it, please could you sign the copyright contributor agreement per the instructions on: https://launchpad.net/~uff-contributors

That looks like pretty much where I wanted them, actually-- in testing it myself, I found it looked good with the stem even with the capital letters.

...Actually, slight correction: it looks best when the top is lined up with the highest point of the ascender. See attached.

So running nominally baseline-to-ascender? Can you try some experiments thinning the horizontal between the notes down to the thickness of the cut-line used on the 't'; the bar looks a bit heavy compared to the square bracket it is next to.

I'll play with this over the next few days; right now I need to get some rest. If any other contributors want to step up and play with this in the meantime, feel free.

And I agree, the stem does look a bit too bold.

...Er, oops, I misread that comment-- you were referring to the bar, not the stem. (A good sign that I need sleep. :)) That does look awkward, too, now that you mention it.

nb. to self, and others, probably worth tackling U+1D15C (breve) to U+1D64 (quasi-hemi-demi-semi-quaver) at the same time:

  http://unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D100.pdf (Musical Symbols block)

At least two of these characters (266A and 266B) are covered by Bug 812396, and could be back-ported to the proportional font.