Co-chair meeting minutes: August 1, 2024

MNX

Since there has been no further community discussion since our last meeting, we have decided to merge pull request #347, concerning accidental display. Adrian still has the changes required for the octave-shift object (#344) and updating the MNX converter with the most recent specification changes on his to-do list.

MusicXML

We spent a little while discussing issue #529 concerning harmonics. We think that this is a good request, and we will look at this issue in the context of MusicXML 4.1. To ensure backwards compatibility, we will make the number attribute optional for the harmonic element.

SMuFL

We discussed fonts for text-based applications. Daniel is planning as part of the SMuFL 1.5 update to deprecate the existing guidelines for SMuFL fonts for text-based applications in favour of a set of guidelines that prioritises making it possible to type ranges of musical symbols in blocks of regular text at a consistent size, without needing to fiddle with ligatures in order to shift the symbols up or down.

Myke proposed that Daniel should start a draft version of this recommendation, and we discussed a programmatic approach where we could define a data file that specifies ranges of glyphs and the transform and scale operations required to map between the registration and size used in fonts for notation applications and those needed for text-based applications, so that we can have a simple workflow for repeatably converting between the two. Daniel agreed to look into this when time allows.

Next meeting

The next co-chairs’ meeting will be in two weeks on 15 August 2024.