Just a few notes of explanation - I'll stick to the musical part of the story in this instance:

- I wanted to create a font to portray the fingering for tin whistle.
- It needed to cover a 2 octave range
- Semi-tones, rests and ties were required
- I wanted it to be as compatible as possible with the ABC Notation system so that users could download one of the many thousands of tunes available freely on the Web. I never intended however to include any visual info about the duration of the note.
- Likewise if a user knew what the notes were for a tune they should be able to use a normal text editor to enter the notes from the PC keyboard. This means a further departure from the standard ABC Notation, but one that is essential if only one keystroke is to be used to generate a whistle shape.

So I then:

- Created all the various fingering shapes of little whistles in the range of C C# D D# E F F# G ...B c c# d d# ...... a# b c' and saved them as individual .bmp files.

- Chose to use only Sharps instead of Flats (or a mixture of both)for reasons of standardisation and for the reason which follows.

- For the Sharp Accidentals I used the kepad letter between 9 o'clock and 12 0'clock of the main note. If you look at your PC (or Mac) keyboard you'll see that it's fairly easy to come up with a logical rule hence C# uses X, D# uses S, F# uses R (because D is used elsewhere), G# uses T ('cos F is already used), A# uses Q and so on for the next octave using lowercase letters.

- When you get to the the highest note in the two octaves c' I used the letter v immediately to the right of the letter c (you could alternatively think of the c' note as being the note b# - and hence my 9 o'clock rule is maintained).

I'll finish off the rest of this description in a second episode.

Regards, John