Tags: sheetmusic

Printing music with CSS grid

Laying out sheet music with CSS grid—sounds extreme until you see it abstracted into a web component.

We need fluid and responsive music rendering for the web!

While I’m talking about the SVGs on The Session, I thought I’d share something else related to the rendering of the sheet music.

Like I said, I use the brilliant abcjs JavaScript library. It converts ABC notation into sheet music on the fly, which still blows my mind.

If you view source on the rendered SVG, you’ll see that the path and rect elements have been hard-coded with a colour value of #000000. That makes sense. You’d want to display sheet music on a light background, probably white. So it seems like a safe assumption.

Ah, but when it comes to front-end development, assumptions are like little hidden bombs just waiting to go off!

I got an email the other day:

Hi Jeremy,

I have vision problems, so I need to use high-contrast mode (using Windows 11). In high-contrast mode, the sheet-music view is just black!

Doh! All my CSS adapts just fine to high-contrast mode, but those hardcoded hex values in the SVG aren’t going to be affected by high-contrtast mode.

Stepping back, the underlying problem was that I didn’t have a full separation of concerns. Most of my styling information was in my CSS, but not all. Those hex values in the SVG should really be encoded in my style sheet.

I couldn’t remove the hardcoded hex values—not without messing around with JavaScript beyond my comprehension—so I made the fix in CSS:

[fill="#000000"] {
  fill: currentColor;
}
[stroke="#000000"] {
  stroke: currentColor;
}

That seemed to do the trick. I wrote back to the person who had emailed me, and they were pleased as punch:

Well done, Thanks!  The staff, dots, etc. all appear as white on a black background.  When I click “Print”, it looks like it still comes out black on a white background, as expected.

I’m very grateful that they brought the issue to my attention. If they hadn’t, that assumption would still be lying in wait, preparing to ambush someone else.

I added a dark mode to my site last year. Since then I’ve been idly toying with the addition of a dark mode to The Session too.

As with this site, the key to adding a dark mode was switching to custom properties for color and background-color declarations. But my plans kept getting derailed by the sheet music on the site. The sheet music is delivered as SVG generated by ABCJS which hard-codes the colour in stroke and fill attributes:

fill="#000000" stroke="#000000"

When I was describing CSS recently I mentioned the high specifity of inline styles:

Whereas external CSS and embedded CSS don’t have any effect on specificity, inline styles are positively radioactive with specificity.

Given that harsh fact of life, I figured it would be nigh-on impossible to over-ride the colour of the sheetmusic. But then I realised I was an idiot.

The stroke and fill attributes in SVG are presentational but they aren’t inline styles. They’re attributes. They have no affect on specifity. I can easily over-ride them in an external style sheet.

In fact, if I had actually remembered what I wrote when I was adding a dark mode to adactio.com, I could’ve saved myself some time:

I have SVGs of sparklines on my homepage. The SVG has a hard-coded colour value in the stroke attribute of the path element that draws the sparkline. Fortunately, this can be over-ridden in the style sheet:

svg.activity-sparkline path {
  stroke: var(--text-color);
}

I was able to do something similar on The Session. I used the handy currentColor keyword in CSS so that the sheet music matched the colour of the text:

svg path {
  fill: currentColor;
}
svg path:not(stroke="none") {
  stroke: currentColor;
}

Et voila! I now had light-on-dark sheet music for The Session’s dark mode all wrapped up in a prefers-color-scheme: dark media query.

I pushed out out the new feature and started getting feedback. It could be best summarised as “Thanks. I hate it.”

It turns out that while people were perfectly fine with a dark mode that inverts the colours of text, it felt really weird and icky to do the same with sheet music.

On the one hand, this seems odd. After all, sheet music is a writing system like any other. If you’re fine with light text on a dark background, why doesn’t that hold for light sheet music on a dark background?

But on the other hand, sheet music is also like an image. And we don’t invert the colours of our images when we add a dark mode to our CSS.

With that in mind, I went back to the drawing board and this time treated the sheet music SVGs as being intrinsicly dark-on-light, rather than a stylistic choice. It meant a few more CSS rules, but I’m happy with the final result. You can see it in action by visiting a tune page and toggling your device’s “appearance” settings between light and dark.

If you’re a member of The Session, I also added a toggle switch to your member profile so you can choose dark or light mode regardless of your device settings.

abc to SVG | CSS-Tricks

Aw, this is so nice! Chris points to the way that The Session generates sheet music from abc text:

The SVG conversion is made possible entirely in JavaScript by an open source library. That’s the progressive enhancement part. Store and ship the basic format, and let the browser enhance the experience, if it can (it can).

Here’s another way of thinking of it: I was contacted by a blind user of The Session who hadn’t come across abc notation before. Once they realised how it worked, they said it was like having alt text for sheet music! 🤯