Simon Willison’s Weblog

Gonville: a font of musical symbols, compatible with GNU Lilypond. By Simon Tatham. I thoroughly recommend taking a look at the source code—it’s written in Python, contains detailed comments and defines every musical symbol using co-ordinates and trigonometry.

# 8:51 am / lilypond, music, recovered, gonville, simon-tatham

Music Notation with HTML5 Canvas. A pretty decent effort at rendering musical notation using JavaScript and the canvas element.

# 8:53 am / canvas, javascript, music, recovered

Firefox 4: the HTML5 parser—inline SVG, speed and more. A complete replacement for the oldest part of Gecko (the HTML parser dates back to 1998) headed up by HTML5 validator author Henri Sivonen, using the parsing algorithm defined in the HTML5 specification. Improvements include parsing taking place off the main UI thread and the ability to embed SVG and MathML directly inline in HTML pages.

# 8:56 am / gecko, henrisivonen, html5, mathml, svg, recovered, firefox4, parser

Music: The Geeking. More on Simon Tatham’s Gonville music font. He concluded that “Bézier curves are not a good tool for font design”, and instead switched to using curves based on involutes of circles with his own custom curve design tool.

# 12:43 pm / lilypond, music, recovered, bezier, curves, gonville, simon-tatham