Given the still open PRI #229 (http://unicode.org/review/pri229) on changing some symbols' linebreaking class from Alphabetic to Ideographic and the Committee's request for feedback regarding Musical Symbols, I've thought about linebreaking behavior of the set in more general terms. Long story short, I would see line break property of all the barlines changed to Open/Close Punctuation.
Barlines have a function of closing musical units, be it metrical (measures) or logical (phrases). Its punctuation-like semantics are evident, for example, in modern use of Gregorian notation, where different barlines are used at commas, colons, periods etc. of underlying text. In any case, both measured and non-measured, early or modern scores are all favorably being broken at barlines with respect to those properties.
Having it changed this way would be useful in textual context, like the common inline illustrations of rhythm patterns used in many books on music. In fact, the only situation I can imagine as being vague is a user trying to typeset various unencoded early repeat signs (dots on both sides of a series of barlines) with a series of the repeat dots and barlines, what would be an edge case and in itself a hack anyway.
Rest of the set would stay as Alphabetic and related entries would be changed to Open/Close Punctuation as follows. Bar-like repeat signs inherit from and are often used instead of the barlines, so these are also included:
1D100;CL # MUSICAL SYMBOL SINGLE BARLINE
1D101;CL # MUSICAL SYMBOL DOUBLE BARLINE
1D102;CL # MUSICAL SYMBOL FINAL BARLINE
1D103;OP # MUSICAL SYMBOL REVERSE FINAL BARLINE
1D104;CL # MUSICAL SYMBOL DASHED BARLINE
1D105;CL # MUSICAL SYMBOL SHORT BARLINE
1D106;OP # MUSICAL SYMBOL LEFT REPEAT SIGN
1D107;CL # MUSICAL SYMBOL RIGHT REPEAT SIGN
Received on Wed Jul 11 2012 - 16:26:25 CDT
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