Unicode musical symbols [Was: [xsl] XSL and XMLSchema]

[Tony Graham <Tony dot Graham at ireland dot sun dot com>]

Karim Barkati wrote at 27 Apr 2001 16:29:09 +0200:
 > Tony Graham a écrit :
...
 > > Out of curiousity, have you looked at using the new Musical Symbols
 > > characters in Unicode 3.1 (see
 > > http://www.unicode.org/unicode/reports/tr27/ and
 > > http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D100.pdf) to represent the notes?
...
 > I already thought to use the musical symbols of the new unicode, but I
 > haven't decided yet if I put these symbols directly in the XML file or later,
 > because they are insufficiant to describe music notation, as pitch and other
 > things more complicated.

That's why I was wondering whether you'd use them, since it seems that
you'd need more information than the musical symbols by themselves can
provide, so there's an obvious tradeoff between being able to
represent the notes as notes (once you have the font support) -- which
may make it easier to read the plain XML files when a MusicML (or
whatever) application isn't available -- and using the same element-
or attribute-based mechanism as you need to use to represent pitch,
etc.

There is problem that I see with the musical symbols and XSL or XSLT
(to bring this back on topic before I feel too guilty).  If you need
to transform from *ML that uses the musical symbols into something
else that doesn't, you'd have to match on the data content (or
attribute content) to work out what note to represent.  Furthermore,
in some cases you'd have to be prepared to match both the precomposed
and the uncomposed forms of the symbols, since either could be used.
If your *ML did an SVG and you put multiple notes in the one text node
or attribute value, you'd also have to do a non-XML parse of that data
to work out what notes you had.

 > What does your book treat on?

Unicode.  See http://www.menteith.com/unicode/primer/.

Regards,


Tony Graham
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Tony Graham                           mailto:tony.graham@ireland.sun.com
Sun Microsystems Ireland Ltd                       Phone: +353 1 8199708
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