NOTATIO

Are you using the optically-corrected "Text" variant? When I printed out their font specimen, I was pleasantly reassured that it had a more substantial presence than the non-optically-corrected regular weight. In any case, your temporary solution is a good one to achieve this effect. Yes,...

As for an existing free font to start with: don’t we all agree that Century Schoolbook is very suitable font? I’m not a big fan of Old Std for music notation either. Century Schoolbook is quite solid and doesn’t have too much contrast. It’s rather too wide in my opinion, though. We could produce a ...

Thanks for the kind words. Hercules Text is indeed a very beautiful font. Unfortunately, in most cases it is probably not dark enough to fit in well with newer music fonts that represent more faithfully the darker look of hand-engraved scores. As a temporary solution it is possible to give the font ...

As I've said in another thread, it might be a suitable alternative to approach a professional type designer to create the kind of text font needed for music engraving. If it is based on a design that already exists and that only has to be tweaked for this particular purpose, it might be a good offer...

I've spent some time trying to recreate the example that Schonbergian posted earlier. I must say, it's quite "annoying" how difficult it is just to come close to the original, let alone surpassing it by means of digital engraving. The text font I've used (for lyrics and expressions) is Her...

The guys (and a few girls) at http://typedrawers.com/ might help. Lots of experts in type design there; I'm sure some of them are familiar with FontForge. Another alternative: https://typography.guru/ It's primarily focused on typography in general, but there are a few members around who are familia...