preliminary proposal: New Unicode characters for Arabic music half-flat and half-sharp symbols

[Hans Åberg via Unicode]

> On 17 May 2018, at 16:47, Garth Wallace via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, May 17, 2018 at 12:41 AM Hans Åberg <haberg-1 at telia.com> wrote:
> 
> > On 17 May 2018, at 08:47, Garth Wallace via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> > 
> >> On Wed, May 16, 2018 at 12:42 AM, Hans Åberg via Unicode <unicode at unicode.org> wrote:
> >> 
> >> It would be best to encode the SMuFL symbols, which is rather comprehensive and include those:
> >>  https://www.smufl what should be unified.org
> >>  http://www.smufl.org/version/latest/
> >> ...
> >> 
> >> These are otherwise originally the same, but has since drifted. So whether to unify them or having them separate might be best to see what SMuFL does, as they are experts on the issue.
> >> 
> > SMuFL's standards on unification are not the same as Unicode's. For one thing, they re-encode Latin letters and Arabic digits multiple times for various different uses (such as numbers used in tuplets and those used in time signatures).
> 
> The reason is probably because it is intended for use with music engraving, and they should then be rendered differently.
> 
> Exactly. But Unicode would consider these a matter for font switching in rich text.

One original principle was ensure different encodings, so if the practise in music engraving is to keep them different, they might be encoded differently.

> > There are duplicates all over the place, like how the half-sharp symbol is encoded at U+E282 as "accidentalQuarterToneSharpStein", at U+E422 as "accidentalWyschnegradsky3TwelfthsSharp", at U+ED35 as "accidentalQuarterToneSharpArabic", and at U+E444 as "accidentalKomaSharp". They are graphically identical, and the first three even all mean the same thing, a quarter tone sharp!
> 
> But the tuning system is different, E24 and Pythagorean. Some Latin and Greek uppercase letters are exactly the same but have different encodings.
> 
> Tuning systems are not scripts.

That seems obvious. As I pointed out above, the Arabic glyphs were originally taken from Western ones, but have a different musical meaning, also when played using E12, as some do.