SMuFL is a specification that provides a standard way of mapping the thousands of musical symbols required by conventional music notation into the Private Use Area in Unicode’s Basic Multilingual Plane for a single (format-independent) font.
Most fonts containing musical symbols use a glyph layout that was first introduced in 1985 with Adobe’s Sonata font, which accommodates fewer than 200 basic symbols. In the last three decades, individual software vendors and font designers have built upon this de facto standard in an uncoordinated and haphazard fashion, leading to significant inconsistencies between different music font families. Furthermore, all existing music font families make use of many separate font files containing different subsets of symbols, not taking advantage of the capabilities of OpenType and Unicode.
In 1998, a range of 220 glyphs for musical symbols was added to the Unicode standard, but this range does not significantly expand upon the initial set of symbols contained in Sonata, and has not yet been widely adopted.
The goal of SMuFL is to establish a new standard glyph mapping for musical symbols that is optimised for modern font formats and that can be adopted by a variety of software vendors and font designers, for the benefit of all users of music notation software.
SMuFL is developed by Steinberg. Dorico, the music notation program I use, makes use of SMuFL. .
See also https://www.smufl.org/
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