MNX Specification Working Group meeting: September 8, 2026
Staff lines
Work on specifying the number of staff lines (pull request #548, issue #531) is now complete. It’s now possible to specify zero as the number of staff lines. We agreed that the pull request can be merged. There is further work to be done on how staff configurations interact with layouts, but we’ll return to this in future.
Veritura
In discussion #549, Peter Yang announced the release of a new web-based notation editor called Veritura that uses MNX as its native format. The implementation makes liberal use of the _x vendor extensions mechanism. Adrian asked Peter which of their specific extensions could be taken more or less as-is and used in upstream MNX.
Caesura
We started by discussing caesuras: these could be added to markings relatively simply, in the same way as breath marks. They will need to incorporate the different types of caesuras currently supported by MusicXML. Myke suggests that we should define the shape (“thin”, “thick”, “curved”, etc.) and the number of strokes (an enumeration with values “single” and “double”).
Percussion clefs
We then moved on to discussing percussion clefs: the main issue is how to map the note staff positions. Although the intention is that notes on unpitched percussion instruments should be written using “kit notes”, we can specify that pitched notes written on a percussion instrument will be positioned as if the percussion clef is the same as a G clef. We will add the value “percussion” to the “sign” enumeration used by the clef sign object. We will also add a boolean for “hide”, defaulting false, to allow the hiding of any clef, including the new percussion clef.
Rich text
We revisited last year’s proposal for encoding rich text from issue #459. After much lively discussion, we agreed that the current proposal is more or less fit for purpose, modulo a decision on exactly how to refer to a semantic style ID registered globally in the document. Adrian will make a fresh proposal for how text items can be encoded in measures, with a type enumeration intended to specify the text item’s purpose.
We left as a treat for our next meeting a decision on how to specify the mapping between text size and musical space size.
Next meeting
The next spec working group meeting is scheduled for Tuesday 22 September 2026.