Breaking the Silence - SMuFL incoming

[Danielku15]

It's been a while since the last update and the reason for the silence is simple: I was travelling the last month enjoying the nature & cities of Scotland and England. During these travels I only was fiddling a little bit on alphaTab.

The main big thing I started working on is the SMuFL compliance. For those who don't know about SMuFL.

SMuFL is a specification that provides a standard way of mapping the thousands of musical symbols required by conventional music notation into the Private Use Area in Unicode’s Basic Multilingual Plane for a single (format-independent) font.

https://www.smufl.org/

Over the years alphaTab has accumulated a lot of customizations in paddings alignments etc. as the standard emerged and evolved we only adapted it on the level that we use Bravura as font for our glyphs. With #1949 I plan to add proper spec compliance which means:

• A wide range of alignments, paddings, scales etc. will be adjusted to fit the spec. My goal is to eliminate as far as possible and reasonable any custom paddings and alignment shifts.
• We soon can customize the look&feel of the music notation by using alternative fonts.

It's a lot of fiddling, pixel shifting and detailed checking to still get the alignments correct but its worth the effort to clean out all the tech-debt and straighten the path for future extensions.

Here some early insight how using alternative SMuFL fonts can lead to different look&feel on the music sheet:

Unfortunately not all fonts provide all glyphs and the standard is not precise on how to detect this and what what to do in this cases. As you can see above Finale Jazz and Leland are lacking some glyphs we use in alphaTab for vibratos and fade-ins.