Add glyphs for fretboard diagrams (guitar, bass, ukulele, lute, etc. )

[edellaq]

With a relatively small number of glyphs it could be implemented a system to write fretboard diagrams in a quite flexible way.

Being a guitarist myself, I already developed on my own a prototype, that I currently use, and I'd love to see it integrated in the main official font.

here the link to the files http://enricodellaquila.blogspot.it/p/my-fonts-page-for-guitar.html

and some examples can be found here https://www.facebook.com/My-Guitar-Fonts-450268108496016/

The font is based on a small series of fixed width characters, some of which (the 3-4 kinds of empty fret) have an actual width. All the other symbols have width=0 (so they don't advance the cursor position) and negative left offset (so they overlap over the previous character). In this way it's easy to write the usual diagrams we see, even with a regular text editor. You can write both vertical and horizontal fretboards

My current font version simply rewrites the regular characters on the keyboard, so the number of symbols is limited to the ones I use more often. I'd like to expand a bit the glyphs number, to include other that I didn't think about at first. I'll be happy to discuss what ones.

[dspreadbury]

Years ago we started an encoding effort in SMuFL to encode woodwind fingering diagrams. That effort foundered on the complexity of requiring hundreds of glyphs due to the combinatorial explosition of combinations of fingerings. Fretboard chord diagrams have a similarly enormous number of combinations.

Obviously it would be possible to generate chord diagrams with a smaller number of characters using advanced typography features such as glyph positioning and substitution, but at the moment SMuFL tries to be agnostic about the font technologies required to produce diagrams.

The current Chord diagrams range provides the basic fundamentals for applications that need to produce chord diagrams, but my feeling is that the graphical requirements of chord diagrams are sufficiently simple that it is reasonable to propose that application developers would draw these using primitives rather than using the characters encoded in SMuFL.

There is plenty of evidence for this, by the way: I'm not aware of any music notation software, whether desktop or web-based, that uses font characters for chord diagrams, instead using primitive drawing. Even Finale, which once used the Seville font with a couple of hundred preset chord diagrams in it, no longer uses this approach.

So I believe SMuFL already encodes fretboard chord diagrams to a sufficient extent.