blotting

[Han-Wen Nienhuys]

Hi guys,

I've been looking through the magnifying glass at some sheet music,
and it turns out that the blotting diameters aren't as simple as you'd
think.

In summary: please use a magnifying glass to determine the appropriate
rounding for the glyph that you're making; the roundness may vary.

In general: for different characters, there are different
blot-diameters. Typically, line like glyphs (tenuto, ledgers), or
characters with lines in them (natural sign), have rounded endings
matching the thicknesses of those lines.  Ledgers sometimes also have
small straight sections at the endings, i.e. blot-diameter for ledger
line is 2/3 to 1 its thickness, which is still much more than
staff-linethickness).

For the whole rest, the blot-diameter is very small (appr. 0.75 to 1.0
staff line thickness.) This small blotting appears in both the convex
corners (filling up), and concave corners.

Note that the blotting does work more or less at 600 dpi -- run

  mf "\nonstopmode; mode:=ljfive; input feta20.mf;"
  gftodvi feta20.600gf

Over here, I see a rounded corner on one side of the half
rest. Perhaps we should add some hinting. OTOH, 600 dpi is a rather
low resolution for really nice printing. Perhaps it's not worth the
trouble.

Some other interesting tidbits that I saw: one Breitkopf & Haertel
edition consistently lets the top of the stems pierce the staff lines
by a small amount, and the bottom of our quarter rest seems too thin
compare to others.


Perhaps another name for blot-diameter is in place. How about "roundness" ? 


-- 

Han-Wen Nienhuys   |   address@hidden    | http://www.cs.uu.nl/~hanwen/