[adrianh]

They're totally different things, though the standards are maintained by the same people.

SMuFL is a font layout specification. It solves the longtime problem of "I'm making a music font. Which Unicode code glyph should I use for a treble clef?" For many years, this was a Wild West situation, and it wasn't possible to swap music fonts because they defined their glyphs in inconsistent ways. This problem is basically solved now, thanks to SMuFL.

MNX is a way of encoding the music itself. It solves the problem of "I have some music notation I want to encode in a semantic format, so it can be analyzed/displayed/exported/imported/etc."

[odyssey7]

Thanks. If it isn't too many questions, are any layout concerns encodable in MNX, or is it scoped to semantic information only?

[adrianh]

Yes, the goal is to allow people to encode layout information optionally — as a separate layer from the semantic information.

One particularly cool thing is the ability for a single document to have multiple layouts (!), which is useful for parts vs. conductor scores. See here for an example: https://w3c.github.io/mnx/docs/mnx-reference/examples/multip...

[odyssey7]

Much appreciated! This is excellent work.