The document summarizes the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) project, which aims to standardize music font design and mapping of musical symbols. SMuFL defines a set of 2554 musical glyphs mapped to Unicode, including all existing musical symbols. It also provides guidelines for font design and JSON metadata formats to help applications use SMuFL fonts. The first SMuFL font, Bravura, has been released under an open license and includes all recommended glyphs. SMuFL version 1.0 is targeting release in early 2014 and is already supported in some music software like LilyPond, with more support planned.

1. Standard Music Font Layout
MusicXML community meeting
14 March 2014
Daniel Spreadbury

2. A brief history of music fonts
• First commercial music font was Sonata from Adobe in
1985, with 176 glyphs, organised mnemonically for a
Latin keyboard
• Became de facto standard for mapping of most music
fonts: e.g. Petrucci (Finale, 1988), Opus (Sibelius, 1993)
• Range of 220 musical symbols was added to Unicode in
1998; to date, no font has completely implemented this
Unicode range

3. Problems to be solved
• Lack of a real standard makes sharing
music fonts between applications difficult
• Sonata’s 170 glyphs and Unicode’s 220
glyphs are insufficiently broad in scope
• No agreement on how to expand beyond
these initial sets

4. What is SMuFL?
• A standard way of mapping musical symbols
to the Private Use Area of the Basic
Multilingual Plane in Unicode
• A set of technical guidelines for how music
fonts should be designed and built
• Simple JSON metadata formats to help
applications use SMuFL fonts easily
• Released under MIT license, free to
use/modify

5. What’s included
• 108 discrete sub-ranges of glyphs
• 2554 glyphs… and counting!
• Includes all 220 glyphs from the Unicode
Musical Symbols range
• Also includes recommendations for
ligatures, stylistic alternates/sets, etc.

6. What’s included

7. Bravura

8. Bravura
• The first SMuFL font (OpenType/SVG/WOFF)
• Includes all SMuFL recommended glyphs, and
hundreds of optional glyphs
• Released under the SIL Open Font License
– Free to use, bundle, embed, create derivative
versions, etc.
– Only licensing restrictions are that the font cannot be
sold on its own; derivative versions cannot use the
same name; and derivative versions must be
released under the same licensing terms

9. Current status
• Version 0.85; targeting 1.0 release in 1H
2014
• After 1.0, existing code points/glyph names
won’t change
• Remaining milestones to 1.0 release
– Technical guidelines for SMuFL fonts for text-
based applications
– Release of a version of Bravura for text-based
applications

10. Current status
• Supported already in LilyPond by way of
openLilyLib
• Support coming in MuseScore 2.0,
Steinberg’s in-development scoring app,
other as-yet unannounced projects
• Bravura already shipping with commercial
products, e.g. from Rising Software

11. Font-specific JSON metadata
{
"fontName" : "Bravura”,
"fontVersion": "0.8",
"engravingDefaults": {
"staffLineThickness": 0.1,
"stemThickness": 0.1,
"beamThickness": 0.5,
"beamSpacing": 0.25, ...
},
"glyphs": {
"noteheadBlack": {
"stemDownNW": [ 0.0, -0.184 ],
"stemUpSE": [ 1.328, 0.184 ]
}, ...
},
}

12. Font-specific JSON metadata

13. More information
www.smufl.org

14. Thank you!
d.spreadbury@steinberg.de