rationale behind default space/sclaing setting
I'm just curious how the value for the default "space" setting came to be chosen - if it has some historical significance or what. For my jazz lead sheets, I always found it too small and had increased it in my Jazz Lead Sheet template, but typesetting classical piano music, I'm finding it nice. That seems in keeping with the published music I have on hand.
Comments
I don't know if it is for THIS reason, but the default Scale value (1.764 mm) happens to be the value at which the font used to draw the musical symbols (i.e. mscore-20.ttf) is scaled at 20 pt. In several places in the source code it is implied that 20 pt is the design size of the font.
But it might be just a coincidence...
M.
In reply to I don't know if it is for by Miwarre
Sounds like too strong a connection to be coincidence, so I think that explains it. Of course, that just pushes the question back one notch: howdid the glyph sizes get chosen? I guess what I'm trying to understand is, were these sizes chosen to match the style of some particular engraver, if there are standards for these sorts of things, or what.
In reply to Sounds like too strong a by Marc Sabatella
Historical background: The glyphs come from a font used in Lilypond (presumably its 'main' font, if it has more than one). For use with MuseScore, they were initially converted from the original Metafont format to a format which could be used with/by FontForge; more development went on on the font and now the FontForge .SDF file is the official 'source' for MuseScore mscore-20 font.
So, the original glyph sizes were chosen by whomever designed the Lilypond font. In particular, the fact that 1 spatium (i.e. the distance between two stave lines) corresponds to 256 font units is a decision which goes back to the another era, and possibly its reasons are now no longer known to our community.
Same reasoning for the apparent relevance of the 20 pt pitch...
Can anyone cast more light on this obscure subject?
M.
In reply to Lilypond? by Miwarre
Creators of the Lilypond Emmentaler font are Han Wen, Jan Nieuwenhuizen and many more people of the Lilypond community. There is an interesting background story on the naming of the font btw. To find an answer on the spatium/font-units, perhaps a search on Lilypond's mailing list might reveal something.