Adobe System’s font of Music Notation – and, first original typeface
Backstory
It’s 1984, Adobe had been converting fonts to PostScript to use on printers licensed with PostScript. Sumner Stone was hired as the head of the type group and wanted to create Adobe Originals. Sumner asked me if I would like to create a font of music notation. I was a good fit. In addition to being a violinist, I was working towards my Master’s at Stanford in Digital Typography – a new program created by Charles Bigelow and Donald Knuth. There were no digital fonts for music that could be converted to postscript. After some research, I realized music notation was further behind than I realized. Music manuscripts were still being sent to Korea to be produced cheaply using a music typewriter and hand-drawn embellishments. Or, local copyists relied on rub-off letter transfers like the popular Note-A-Set.
What could go wrong?
There were no relevant examples of music notation fonts – no defined character sets, no keyboard layouts, and no software to set a page of music. Every decision on those fronts would have future consequences.
Music didn’t behave in the same way as our western language fonts – it was not set on a baseline, it didn’t have kerning (left and right space baked-in to each letter), some required shapes were not “font-like” – like slurs (those eyebrow looking things) are custom fit to their context. The precision of placement in music was much more important than it is in regular text – a note placed slightly off is a different sound entirely. A note was always placed within a staff so it needed to fall precisely on a line or within a space. Existing typesetting software couldn’t place things easily on the vertical axis. The entire page needed to be fitted to be complete, and end at a logical place. Multiple staves had to line up for different instruments.
Strategy to avoid what could go wrong
I created a “staff” unit from which all notes were scaled. Each note had its origin at the point that controlled its location in the staff – this ensured precise alignment. Unfortunately, there was a bug in PostScript that caused characters without widths to not print at all. In fact, I broke PostScript a number of times. We got that fixed.
I had a few references to work with, some exquisite printed music from Schott on one end, and the easy-to-scan Note-A-Set fonts. I didn’t like the horsiness1 of many of the note-a-set characters, in particular the flags. I modeled the flag from the profile of my favorite wine glass.
Adobe found a programmer, Geoff Brown, who was in the process of releasing a music composition program, Deluxe Music Construction, and got him on board. This would make the font more useable when it was released.
I sent samples to a domain expert, Don Byrd for his thorough critiques.
Side-trip – the origin of regrettable character inclusions: At one point Geoff needed backward-facing characters to create clustered notes. I resisted because adding these characters violated the global nature of the character set. We explained to Geoff how to programmatically accomplish what he needed with the existing character set. Long story short, Geoff was busy taking his program to the finish line so he may not have focused on the solution we put out, and Adobe reminded me we need to accommodate his requirements. After the release of the Deluxe Music Construction Set and the Adobe Sonata font, Geoff agreed he could have done the clusters programmatically. These vestigial backward notes will live forever in the digital Ecoverse.
Adobe’s font-designer’s page (on the way-back-machine) – Adobe has stopped including non-alphabetic fonts and font designers.
Press – Podcasts
Cleo Huggins, the designer of the first music font – Scoring Notes – Podcast
A brief history of music notation on computers – Scoring Notes – Podcast
Music fonts and open standards with Daniel Spreadbury – Scoring Notes. Podcast with Daniel Spreadbury – founder of the Standard Music Font Layout – SMuFL.
Notes to self
Do a lot of research, find the best existing solutions, find experts, ask questions, design to the highest of all standards – because it will last longer than you think and you don’t want any regrets.
If you’re breaking new ground, do it with immense respect. You might be creating a standard that will be hard or impossible to change.