GSoC 2020 update: July 25

[Owen Lamb]

Hi all,

I didn't make my goal of being able to drop Bravura in, but I made progress.

My research on shape-notes you can see on the list archive--thanks again
everyone for helping out! I'm fairly certain now what to propose to add to
SMuFL, and have written a draft proposal that I will send at the end of the
day Monday if no new input has come in since then.

Otherwise, my work has been on removing the old LILY, LILF, and LILC tables
from Emmentaler. I had to remove a couple of scheme functions to do it,
though, since they basically just returned some part of those tables' data
the same way it was originally packaged. As such, the code is in a messy
state right now--I haven't looked into where they're called yet.

Though it's not called for in the specs, I moved LILY's design_size
property to a temporary spot in the metadata.json file. I have written a
proposal to add it as an optional top-level expression, which I will send
with the shape-note glyph proposal. This will make differentiating size
variations of fonts (such as Emmentaler) much easier for programs that
don't have access to the OTF optical size feature (such as LilyPond).

Bravura is recognized as a font (at least, when I make eight of it,
labelling them with LilyPond's design sizes), and its metadata is
recognized (again, when duplicated). However, no glyphs appear on the
screen, and I haven't figured out why yet. But that's for next week.

Next week, I plan to do the following:

   - Figure out where the deleted scheme functions are used and work around
   them accordingly.
   - Contact the W3C Music Notation Community Group regarding the two
   proposals to SMuFL.
   - Contact the FontForge mailing list about the issues I've been
   experiencing--now that I'm reworking how LilyPond reads fonts, now is the
   best time to try to get Emmentaler into an OTC.
   - Allow single fonts, without size variations, to be imported into
   LilyPond. (At *this* point, Bravura needs to at least show some glyphs,
   however badly scaled.)
   - Fill out the engravingDefaults object with the other necessary values.
   - Have LilyPond read from these values.

Well, of all the new things I'm experiencing in this job, I'm starting to
experience burnout. With just about a month left, though, I know I need to
keep at it. If you're the praying type, I wouldn't mind if you sent a few
my way! In the meantime, I'm going to try to get a healthy work/rest
schedule going.

Thanks,
Owen