U+1D159 MUSICAL SYMBOL NULL NOTEHEAD is invisible

[dscorbett]

Font

NotoMusic-Regular.ttf

Where the font came from, and when

Site: https://github.com/googlefonts/noto-fonts/blob/7f12f3e70af9d2507206093d903eb9945d7e4622/unhinted/NotoMusic/NotoMusic-Regular.ttf
Date: 2020-04-24

Font version

Version 2.000

Issue

The Unicode Standard says “Even though the null notehead has no visual appearance of its own, it is not a default ignorable code point; some indication of its presence, as for instance a dotted box glyph, should be shown if displayed outside of a context that supports full musical rendering.” In this font, it appears as a space. That’s better than a glyph with no advance width, but it would be even better if it were visible. Combining marks should still look good when applied to it; maybe the glyph should remain a space when there’s a mark.

Character data

𝄄𝅙𝄄𝅙𝅥𝄄
U+1D104 MUSICAL SYMBOL DASHED BARLINE
U+1D159 MUSICAL SYMBOL NULL NOTEHEAD
U+1D104 MUSICAL SYMBOL DASHED BARLINE
U+1D159 MUSICAL SYMBOL NULL NOTEHEAD
U+1D165 MUSICAL SYMBOL COMBINING STEM
U+1D104 MUSICAL SYMBOL DASHED BARLINE

Screenshot

[nizarsq]

[dscorbett]

Combining marks should still look good when applied to it; maybe the glyph should remain a space when there’s a mark.

Since I wrote that, I have modified my opinion: the glyph should definitely remain invisible when there’s a mark, because that is the main use of this character, and the mark is a sufficient “indication of its presence”. The dotted square is just a fallback for when there would otherwise be no “indication of its presence”.