Reference glyphs of musical accidentals quarter sharp and quarter flat

[Doug Ewell]

I personally support Kirk Miller's proposal to add the more commonly used symbols as separate characters, rather than complicating the encoding by adding variation selectors to change the glyph to something quite different.

We don't always realize it, but ordinary users generally don't know anything about variation selectors.

—Doug


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________________________________
From: Unicode <unicode-bounces at corp.unicode.org> on behalf of Marius Spix via Unicode <unicode at corp.unicode.org>
Sent: Wednesday, January 3, 2024 9:09:14 AM
To: unicode at corp.unicode.org <unicode at corp.unicode.org>
Subject: Reference glyphs of musical accidentals quarter sharp and quarter flat

Hi,

I just noted that the reference glyphs for

U+1D132 MUSICAL SYMBOL QUARTER TONE SHARP

and

U+1D133 MUSICAL SYMBOL QUARTER TONE FLAT

on the code chart are very unusual. In the standard notation, the
quarter sharp is represented by U+266F with only one downstroke and the
quarter flat by a mirrored version of U+266D MUSIC FLAT SIGN (or as a
variant of U+266D with a stroke). Please find the attached image for
reference.

I had a look at the mailing list and there was already a suggestion by
Johnny Farraj in 2015, by Markus Scherer in 2018 and by Gavin Jared Bala
and Kirk Miller in 2023 (request L2/23-276). The letter also includes
the currently missing characters for three-quarter sharp and
three-quarter flat, two characters I also see an urgent need for.

Howerver, in contrast to that request, I propose to unify two suggested
characters with existing ones and change the reference glyph instead of
encoding a new character instead.

U+1D1ED MUSICAL SYMBOL REVERSED FLAT (requested) = U+1D133 MUSICAL
SYMBOL QUARTER TONE FLAT (existing)
U+1D1EB MUSICAL SYMBOL HALF SHARP (requested) = U+1D133 MUSICAL SYMBOL
QUARTER TONE FLAT (existing)

The stroked variant of the quarter flat (which does not appear in
the proposal of Gavin Jared Bala and Kirk Miller, but can be found in
several pieces) could be obtained by combining U+1D132 MUSICAL SYMBOL
QUARTER TONE SHARP with a variation selector (e. g. U+FE00).

What do you think?

Best regards,

Marius
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