Shape-note shapes

• Aug 18, 2015 - 15:07

I love the shape-note plugin, although I often feel as if I'm about 70% of the way to being able to write sacred-harp music using it (mostly because of problems with "repeat" notation). But my big complaint is the "diamond" note head, which appears too small (especially in the "hollow; half-note form, where it's difficult to distinguish it from a "filled" quarter note, especially if the note lies on a line rather than a space).

So my question is: is it possible to edit the font somehow, at least for my own use, to make those diamond note-heads a bit larger? If my enlarging the note-head means that the layout-of-notes-in-a-measure algorithm gets a tiny bit messed up and squeezes other notes too close to this one, that's totally fine. Having more than one "diamond" in a run of notes is so rare that this is unlikely to ever cause me a problem. :)

BTW, I've also copied the plugin and made a new version that's suitable for 4-shapes-only (since that's all I use), which has the advantage that it needs no UI, and can be given a simple shortcut, so that after every edit I just press ctrl-shift-Z and don't have to click twice to make the update happen. I'm not certain whether I should share this, and if so, HOW I should share it. (I could, of course, at the same time make a 7-note-only version, for folks who want to write that kind of music.)

--John


Comments

By the way, the Bravura font has much nicer diamond shapes than do Gonville or Emmentaler ... but Gonville's style for all the other notes appeals to me more.

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