Re: mensural notation: patch, question, plan

[Pal Benko]

Hi Jürgen,

> Currently, the thickness property of the flexa shape aplies to all
> segments of the outline.  IIUC, you are suggesting to apply the
> thickness property only to the left and right outline segment of the
> flexa shape, while hard-wiring the upper and lower segment wrt to the
> proportions in the .mf code for the brevis note head.  I think this is
> somewhat inconsistent.  If we really need different thicknesses for
> the vertical and horizontal segments, we may want to control this
> behavior with a separate property.

That's fine with me.

> However, I just looked at a few facsimiles as well as contemporary
> educational works on mensural ligatures, and my impression is that all
> line segments roughly have the same thickness (unless the steepness is
> extremely high, in which case we may want to apply some thickness
> correction factor to the horizontal segments in order to compensate
> for optical illusion effects).  Do you really think that the
> horizontal and vertical segments need to be controlled separately?

Yes!

> Do you have facsimiles or contemporary works with noticeable
> difference between the thickness of the horizontal and vertical
> outline segments?

Yes: I have facsimiles of about twenty masses from Petrucci prints and
different codices (e.g. the Chigi codex; I don't know where the other
facsimiles come from).  There are at least three different scribes
(i.e. script styles) I can distinguish.  The horizontal lines of
flexae are always like that of breves and not like the vertical ones
(i.e. distinctly heavier).

If you are interested, I'll try to make some scans.

Pal

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