Allow descenders?

[dankreider]

Hi Marc, thanks for your work on this! I was searching for a Roman numeral analysis font and found Campania.

Are you going to be making any changes or improvements to Campania? If so, I'd like to suggest including descenders on stacked numbers, which would give them some room to breathe (pic below).

There are some other kerning issues, but again I wasn't sure if this font was still being developed.

Thanks again!

[MarcSabatella]

Hi! I'm not actively working on the font at the moment, but I can certainly consider improvements next time I do decide to take another look at it. But also, being open source, I welcome contributions from others!

The main thing I actually want to do is devise some system for creating the brackets used to indicate modulations.

There have also been requests to more directly support British-style notation, using the letters a, b, and c to indicate inversions instead of the numbers. This is doable now if you escape the b with a backslash (type I\b) to prevent it from turning into a flat.

Do let me know about kerning issues you notice!

Regarding descenders I'm not so sure this would be desirable, though. Looks fine for lower case but maybe not so much for upper case, and wouldn't it make more sense to keep them aligned? I'm curious to hear what others have to say about it, though.

[dankreider]

Hi Marc, I installed Campania and tried it out in Dorico. Overall it looks great. I'll preface this with saying I don't pretend to be any sort of font expert, so take my opinions for whatever they're worth. Here are a couple changes I'm suggesting: - The diminished circle stroke is disproportionately heavy compared to the rest of the font, and is too close to its preceding numeral - the numbers stack too closely on top of one another - The right boundary of the slash (for secondary dominants) is too close to the glyph that follows - The superscript is too close to the uppercase V that precedes it - The brackets are too close to the figure - the left padding of the flat needs to be increased Some examples are below: Campania's defaults above, and the changes I'd make below that. They're very, very slight. I like the bottom number in the stack to descend below the baseline: generally far enough that the middle stroke of the 4 aligns to the baseline. That's what I meant by descenders.  To me these small kerning and leading changes make a huge difference in the appearance and legibility of the font. I'm not sure if these are changes you'd be interested in making. I'd be willing to try my hand at it, although I'm a beginner when it comes to font creation (I just know what I like, visually). Forgive the basic question, but if this font is open source, that means I can download and modify it myself? Do I credit you if I release my own derivative version? I want to make sure I'm above board with all that.

[MarcSabatella]

Sorry, I missed your comment because the issue was closed, so I've reopened it as this is still good discussion to have.

I don't disagree with any of your points about kerning, although if course this is all subjective, so I also wouldn't disagree with someone who made the opposite suggestions :-).

I'm no font expert either, but I did try to follow some best practices here in terms of organization of the font and my use of "feature files" to make it relatively easy to tweak things like this. So It should be a relatively simple matter to get in and make the changes. And yes, since it's open source, any is welcome to do so. You can then use the modified font yourself, or if you wish to share your improvements with others, make a "pull request" here and I can consider merging your changes into the next official version of Campania.

I will say that while I do do like what I see in your image, I am a bit concerned this would alter the spacing of things pretty significantly and might break any manual adjustments people have already made in their notation software. So I'd want to here more consensus among other users of the font that this would be desirable. I'm talking about the descenders specifically - I think everything else you describe would be more innocuous.

[dankreider]

Got it, thanks Marc! I think I'll try my hand at it.

I think the reason descenders are helpful is the limitation of vertical space... if there are three numbers that need to be stacked, either they're going to be crunched together, or too small... or they'll need to be ascenders/descenders. My thought is that allowing the descender gives the option of sharing some of that vertical space requirement. But yes, I'd be curious to hear what others think.

Best regards,
Dan