The treble clef is located on the ampersand key (&), because it resembles an ampersand. Related characters are typically grouped on the same key and are accessed by using the shift, option, and command keys to get related characters.įor instance, the q key is associated with the quarternoteup glyph, Q (or shift-q) with the quarternotedown character, option-q with the quarternotehead character, and so on. The encoding for Sonata is intended to be easy to use for a person typing… The symbols are typically either visually related to the key to which they are associated, or they are related mnemonically through the actual letter on the keycap.

From the Sonata Font Design Specification: Sonata uses a mnemonic approach to mapping.

One of the (many) barriers to interoperability between different scoring applications is that there is no agreement on how music fonts should work, beyond a very basic layout that dates back to the introduction of the first music font, Sonata, which was designed nearly 30 years ago by Cleo Huggins ( Adobe. There are two major components to the work: firstly, a proposed new standard for how musical symbols should be laid out in a font, which I have called the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL to its friends, pronounced with a long “u”, so something like “smoofle”) and secondly, a new music font, called Bravura. Today I’m at the Music Encoding Conference in Mainz, Germany, where I am giving a presentation on the work I have been doing over the past several months on music fonts for our new application.

Microsoft word music notes font