Well, displaying music notation IS essentially desktop publishing. However, that's not really the motivation.
You need to have a large library of symbols to display music: notes and rests from whole note to 64th notes, with stems up or down, fermatas, accents, accidentals, clef marks, dynamics, repeats, etc. It's even worse if you want to support guitar tablature. It's a pain in the rear to maintain a library of symbols like that, especially if you want the images to be high quality and scalable.
By storing symbols in a TrueType font, you automatically get content management. You get a library of symbols in a single file, accessible using standard system APIs. The symbols can be drawn at arbitrary pixel locations using a simple API, and they are automatically resizable to any size you want. They will automatically adapt to varying dot resolutions, so they look as good on a 600dpi printer as they do on a 96dpi monitor. They can be drawn with anti-aliasing, and with ClearType on Windows. If the font designer is good enough, you can even add hints so that the glyphs draw correctly at very small or very large point sizes.
It's a very smart way to go. Even Microsoft uses this technique. If you're running on Windows, do you see the little "_ O X" figures on the buttons at the upper-right corner of your window? Those are all TrueType characters in the Marlett font, as are the arrows on scrollbar buttons and combo boxes. That's why they can resize so easily when you change your desktop settings.
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On Tue, 28 Sep 2004 01:09:50 +0100, "Malcolm Clift" <mail@mjclift.freeserve.co.uk> wrote:
The project only has to display notation i.e. there is no requirement
for the user to be able to drag notes etc...One thing I don't understand is, that commercial sequencers use fonts for their display, leading me to ask is the 'model' they use some sort of notational equivalent of a text editor or a graphics display?
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- Tim Roberts, timr@probo.com
Providenza & Boekelheide, Inc.