As a programmer, I was doing some Unicode testing and I figured out that the 𝄞-character gives an awesome testing candidate. Now, 2 weeks later, I was wondering how these Unicode symbols would be used in practice.
To me it seems that you can't write a music piece in a text editor that way, since you can't overlap the characters, nor change the pitch of the notes: 𝄞𝄚𝄫𝅘𝅥𝄚𝄀
Here's how that renders on my Windows machine in Firefox:
Granted, probably nobody would write their music sheets in Word. So let's assume we have a special music application that could place the individual characters in arbitrary positions and overlap. Like Inkscape for example:
Compare that to a correctly rendered note:
That's not only a difference in font.
So in order to make the font useful, I'd not only need to know how to move the characters, I'd also need to know how to scale each of them individually.
So my question is: how would I need to design the musical characters in a font in order for them to be useful?