Re: G clef changes [was: Re: Alternative music font]

[Carl Sorensen]

On 12/29/09 1:54 PM, "Marc Hohl" <address@hidden> wrote:

> Marc Hohl schrieb:
>> Francisco Vila schrieb:
>>> Just to add a bit to the brainstorming:
>>> 
>>> The uppermost lace of our G-clef already was slightly oversized.
>>> I cannot explain why, but latest proposals I've seen are getting it
>>> even greater.
>>> 
>>> Anyone appreciates the same?
>>>  
>> Well spotted. I was not sure whether this is kind of an optical illusion,
>> but I think there are some side effects, caused by (hidden) depencies
>> of the variables which describe the outline of the clef.
>> 
>> I'll investigate further.
> I decided to start from scratch, because tuning a little bit here and there
> seems not to be the best strategy.
> 
> Being aware that there may be some nonlinearities, I would like to follow
> these items:
> 
> 1) finding an optimal angle for the "spine"
> 2) adapting the lower bulb
> 3) adjusting the upper "loop"

In response to Jan's earlier question, I rotated the whole clef, not just
the spine.

IIUC, rotating the spine makes the upper loop larger and unbalances the
split of the lower loop caused by the spine.  Perhaps we ought to consider
just rotating the whole clef.

I find it very hard to compare the clefs on different pages.  I realize that
it's too late for this test, but in the future, if you make your output in
SVG format, then we can copy clefs from one document to the other and get a
good side-by-side comparision.


> 
> (perhaps 2 and 3 should go together for overall balance, and finally, 1
> should be adapted to the results of 2 and 3, but ...)
> 
> So I created a batch script which adds 0, 0.5, 1, ... 5 (in arbitrary units)
> to the x coordinate of the "spine vector" (which will then be normalized
> anyway,
> so the only thing that's changing is the angle) in the metafont sources,
> compiles the feta font from scratch and uses this new font to typeset an
> example. This took quite a long time (approximately about 75% of the
> time my daughter needed to watch "twilight" on the same machine while
> metafont was bleeding...)
> 
> I concatenated the pdfs to one file, which is too big for the list, so I
> put it on my website:
> 
> http://www.hohlart.de/marc/gclef-slant.pdf
> 
> I know that there is a spurious error on value 2, but I think that's not the
> main problem. Which value looks best?

I think I prefer 1.5.  Thanks for all this work!

Thanks,

Carl