Visual Music Font Comparison

Music notation symbols, fonts, font sources and font creation, SmuFL.
User avatar
John Ruggero
Posts: 2453
Joined: 05 Oct 2015, 14:25
Location: Raleigh, NC USA

Re: Visual Music Font Comparison

Post by John Ruggero »

You are very welcome, Jan. Glad to try to assist this worthy project, if only in a small way.

Not only is your font comparison a wonderful resource, but your explanation of it in the article is as well.
M1 Mac mini (OS 12.4), Dorico, Finale 25.5, GPO 4, Affinity Publisher 2, SmartScore 64 Pro, JW Plug-ins, TG Tools, Keyboard maestro

http://www.cantilenapress.com
Ralph L. Bowers jr.
Posts: 9
Joined: 05 Oct 2015, 15:14

Re: Visual Music Font Comparison

Post by Ralph L. Bowers jr. »

Jan,
Very impressed with your quality work with these plugins.
Can't wait until you post them for sale.
User avatar
jan
Posts: 84
Joined: 22 Jun 2016, 08:29

Re: Visual Music Font Comparison

Post by jan »

John, it took a few weeks, but meanwhile I was able to have a look at the original 1920 print of the Berg opus that is available at the Bavarian State Library Munich (Germany), https://opacplus.bsb-muenchen.de/metaop ... anguage=en. The scans are now uploaded at IMSLP (see http://imslp.org/wiki/4_St%C3%BCcke,_Op.5_(Berg,_Alban) ). So now the public domain state should be definitely clear.

Jan
Last edited by jan on 21 Oct 2016, 11:21, edited 1 time in total.
User avatar
John Ruggero
Posts: 2453
Joined: 05 Oct 2015, 14:25
Location: Raleigh, NC USA

Re: Visual Music Font Comparison

Post by John Ruggero »

I am glad that this has been completely cleared up, Jan. Incidentally, your scan downloaded normally from IMSLP, but the other scan still produces blank pages when I try to download in Safari.
M1 Mac mini (OS 12.4), Dorico, Finale 25.5, GPO 4, Affinity Publisher 2, SmartScore 64 Pro, JW Plug-ins, TG Tools, Keyboard maestro

http://www.cantilenapress.com
User avatar
odod
Posts: 187
Joined: 25 Nov 2015, 15:10

Re: Visual Music Font Comparison

Post by odod »

Here's Jan's newest experiment .. amazing work

https://elbsound.studio/experiments_in_ ... ersion.php
Nuendo 12, FL Studio 20, Reaper 6, Dorico, Sibelius, HOOPUS, Pianoteq 6, Ivory II, Slate, Plugin Alliance, Soundtoys, and yeah i am a gear slut

Serenade Music Engraving Service
User avatar
OCTO
Posts: 1742
Joined: 05 Oct 2015, 06:52
Location: Sweden

Re: Visual Music Font Comparison

Post by OCTO »

AMAZING!
Now when we have plenty of good looking fonts, let us create some beautiful music ;)
User avatar
jan
Posts: 84
Joined: 22 Jun 2016, 08:29

Re: Music Font Comparison

Post by jan »

I have updated the Music Font Comparison to v2.0.
New features are 50 new music font families (about 200 in total), a new contemporary notation example, improved rendering and engraving quality and direct linking (i.e. add ?font=FONTNAME&example=NUMBER to the url and you will get directly to the image, e.g. ?font=Maestro&example=1).
All in all it's a collection of about 1000 font images.

Our friend Wess also provided me with his VintageECP1 and VintageGHMA and improved the engraving in the original example files.
The new "contemporary" example which is actually more an arbitrary collection of a bit less common symbols/noteheads and some more modern notation elements was created together with Jef Chippewa from shirling&neueweise who also designed the "neueweise" font for new music notation.

Chris, from the French Finale forum and from the JW Lua mailing list, helped me with ideas for improving the rendering quality of the images.
In the end the rendering was done externally, but still automated: after extraction from a high-resolution PDF and downsampling, the staff and ledger lines were sharpened with an image processing tool that I developed especially for this process. It combines smooth musical symbols resulting from downsampling (800dpi to 144dpi), but still keeps the horizontal lines ultrasharp (i.e. exactly 1, 2 or 3 pixels in width). The tool still needs some fine-tuning here and there and probably should be expanded for example to barlines, tenuto lines and tuplet brackets. But overall it's already a nice improvement in (automated) music image rendering at low resolutions.

Don't forget that these examples were all derived automatically from the same source document with a JW Lua script and were not manually optimized. Due to some minor limitations in JW Lua it's unfortunately not possible to correct all metrics adjustments automatically, but it still gives a good overview of the fonts.

Happy holidays!

Jan
Elbsound.studio
Post Reply