Music Type Foundry - new fonts!

Music notation symbols, fonts, font sources and font creation, SmuFL.
MJCube
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Re: Music Type Foundry - new fonts!

Post by MJCube »

Congratulations, sir!! What a gigantic compilation of fine, fine work. This ability to precisely mimic the punches of major engraving houses is something a friend & I have fantasized about since Finale first came out in 1988.
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tisimst
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Re: Music Type Foundry - new fonts!

Post by tisimst »

MJCube wrote:Congratulations, sir!! What a gigantic compilation of fine, fine work. This ability to precisely mimic the punches of major engraving houses is something a friend & I have fantasized about since Finale first came out in 1988.
Thank you, MJCube! It has been a long time coming, but I'm very happy to be able to offer them. I hope they can be enjoyable to use and, more importantly, make your scores more personalized.
Music Typeface Designer & Engraver - LilyPond | Sibelius | Finale | MuseScore | Dorico | SMuFL | Inkscape | FontForge
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OCTO
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Re: Music Type Foundry - new fonts!

Post by OCTO »

That is wonderful....

But, some weeks ago Jan A released these fonts for free. Now, how was it possible? Did your old license allowed this? What is the difference?

Also, are your fonts fully and completely compatible between Win and OS X in 2014.5? That is very important for those (me) who work with various copyists. I have experience with 3rd part fonts that suddenly disappear from the system and get strange symbols...
Also 2, tip: release your fonts compatible for Sibelius. After so many fonts available for Finale, the market is fulfilled, BUT Sibelius has very limited fonts, and people are hungry for new fonts. Maybe as a "service" - to edit fonts for Sibelius users' needs.
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Finale 27.3 • Sibelius 2023.5• MuseScore 4+ • Logic Pro X+ • Ableton Live 11+ • Digital Performer 10+ /// MacOS Monterey (secondary in use systems: Fedora 35, Windows 10)
benwiggy
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Re: Music Type Foundry - new fonts!

Post by benwiggy »

So does that mean that MTF-Cadence is SmuFL compatible? And also "Maestro-compatible"?
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tisimst
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Re: Music Type Foundry - new fonts!

Post by tisimst »

OCTO wrote:That is wonderful.... But, some weeks ago Jan A released these fonts for free. Now, how was it possible? Did your old license allowed this? What is the difference?
The old license did allow this, which is causing some confusion in the places where both Jan A and I have been advertising the fonts. There are some big differences, though, as I've had time to look over what Jan A. has done. When I created the fonts originally, I used LilyPond's Emmentaler font's glyphs to fill in the gaps for missing glyphs. Jan's fonts, thus, have more glyphs, but they don't match the font's style. My current fonts, thus, have some holes at the moment. I fully intend to fill in those gaps with glyphs that follow the style of the respective font. The largest omission at the moment is the shape-note family of glyphs. Many glyphs in the current set haven't changed all that much since I changed their license, but some have changed quite a bit.

While both Jan and I utilize some amount of automation in the conversion process, the more I work with fonts, the more I realize that there is no substitute for hand-tuning the glyphs and their settings. Since each program uses the glyphs a little differently from each other, I have found the tuning a necessary step in the process. That's what makes them "High Quality" and really viable for commercial use, IMHO.

Rather than try to create a single font that attempts to be completely compatible with all the different apps, I made the decision to keep them separated, based on the app so they could be made to work the way the app expects them to work. That also means that using the recommended settings is also an important (necessary?) part of the usage equation. Unfortunately, since the user can't import settings individually, I have to include a file that suggest the values so an advanced user (who presumably has settings they want) can enter just the ones that are recommended.
OCTO wrote:Also, are your fonts fully and completely compatible between Win and OS X in 2014.5? That is very important for those (me) who work with various copyists. I have experience with 3rd part fonts that suddenly disappear from the system and get strange symbols...
Yes, these work on 2014.5+. The only main difference I'm aware of is that Mac users will need to add the font name to the MacSymbolFonts.txt file, while Windows users don't. I have yet to hear back from users that there are problems relating to the OS.
OCTO wrote:Also 2, tip: release your fonts compatible for Sibelius. After so many fonts available for Finale, the market is fulfilled, BUT Sibelius has very limited fonts, and people are hungry for new fonts. Maybe as a "service" - to edit fonts for Sibelius users' needs.
I completely agree. I'm in the process of doing this just like I did for Finale. Just give me a little time. I hope you can rest assured that it will be more than a "service" for Sibelius users, but rather REAL support.
benwiggy wrote:So does that mean that MTF-Cadence is SmuFL compatible? And also "Maestro-compatible"?
Yes, MTF-Cadence is SMuFL compatible. It is also LilyPond-compatible and Finale-compatible. I'm not sure if I would call any of my fonts Maestro-compatible in the sense of being a perfect drop-in replacement because Maestro has its own style and my fonts have theirs and I've worked hard to make sure each app will have fonts that are specifically tuned to work optimally for that app.

To delineate which font file is designed for which app, they follow a fairly standard naming convention, for example:

LilyPond - MTF-Cadence-XX (where XX is 13, 14, 16, 18, 20, 23, and 26)
Dorico - MTF-Cadence
Finale - MTF-Cadence-Fin
Sibelius - MTF-CadenceXYZ (where XYZ are the familiar suffixes used by the Opus font, like "Std", "TextStd", etc.)

Hopefully that all makes more sense now. As a font designer, I'm thrilled that Finale and Sibelius are moving toward SMuFL, but until then, I will cater to their unique needs the very best I can. I'm certainly not saying that you should steer-clear of Jan's fonts, but at the very least I hope you'll give my fonts a chance if you like what he has done since they were mine to begin with.

P.S. I am working with close contacts for each app (i.e., Daniel Spreadbury at Steinberg, Mark Adler at MakeMusic, and Sam Butler at Avid) to make sure each app is well supported. And if anything doesn't work perfectly right now (there are definitely some things I'm already working through), they will be updated as soon as I'm able provided I get the necessary feedback from users. Updates are always free, but if you aren't completely satisfied with your purchase and I'm unable to resolve your concerns, I'm happy to provide a full refund within 30 days of purchase. I am totally committed to users' success with my fonts.
Music Typeface Designer & Engraver - LilyPond | Sibelius | Finale | MuseScore | Dorico | SMuFL | Inkscape | FontForge
benwiggy
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Re: Music Type Foundry - new fonts!

Post by benwiggy »

Bravo and well done for all your hard work. I'm particularly interested in the Ross font. (Yes, by "Maestro-compatible", I meant glyph positions in the font.)

Although SMuFL is not yet fully compatible with Finale, it's clearly the way forward.
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jan
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Re: Music Type Foundry - new fonts!

Post by jan »

Here is a comparison I wrote on the free BetvnFIN font from my Elbsound Music Font Package and Abraham's new MTF-Beethoven-Fin:
https://elbsound.studio/beethoven-music-font-test.php

PDFs with a symbol comparison
To sum it up one can say that with BetvnFIN it's just one click to change the music font in Finale with 100% Maestro-compatibility.
But three symbol types are currently not fully consistent because of the automatic font conversion process (the ottava "8" and "8va/ba" are different, same for "15" and "15ma/mb" and the niente "n"). As all composite symbols (e.g. quarter-note accidentals, ottava clefs, etc.) were created automatically they may not look as perfect as designed by Abraham, but not too bad either.
Another advantage of BetvnFIN is that it also holds all other symbols from the original Beethoven font: the Maestro symbol area is only added to the original LilyPond Beethoven font.

MTF-Beethoven-Fin still requires a lot of effort to change a document that uses all Maestro symbols as some symbols are missing, have different metrics, are buggy, cut off or require updated document settings (I counted 36 symbols with visual differences in MTF-Beethoven-Fin). For a simple Finale document that only uses a small notation symbol subset, this will be no big deal. But to change a huge orchestra score to MTF-Beethoven-Fin without having any symbol getting lost seems to be quite a lot of work at the moment. When these bugs are fixed, it will of course be better than BetvnFIN.

Jan Angermueller
Elbsound.studio
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odod
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Re: Music Type Foundry - new fonts!

Post by odod »

jan wrote:Here is a comparison I wrote on the free BetvnFIN font from my Elbsound Music Font Package and Abraham's new MTF-Beethoven-Fin:
https://elbsound.studio/beethoven-music-font-test.php

PDFs with a symbol comparison
To sum it up one can say that with BetvnFIN it's just one click to change the music font in Finale with 100% Maestro-compatibility.
But three symbol types are currently not fully consistent because of the automatic font conversion process (the ottava "8" and "8va/ba" are different, same for "15" and "15ma/mb" and the niente "n"). As all composite symbols (e.g. quarter-note accidentals, ottava clefs, etc.) were created automatically they may not look as perfect as designed by Abraham, but not too bad either.
Another advantage of BetvnFIN is that it also holds all other symbols from the original Beethoven font: the Maestro symbol area is only added to the original LilyPond Beethoven font.

MTF-Beethoven-Fin still requires a lot of effort to change a document that uses all Maestro symbols as some symbols are missing, have different metrics, are buggy, cut off or require updated document settings (I counted 36 symbols with visual differences in MTF-Beethoven-Fin). For a simple Finale document that only uses a small notation symbol subset, this will be no big deal. But to change a huge orchestra score to MTF-Beethoven-Fin without having any symbol getting lost seems to be quite a lot of work at the moment. When these bugs are fixed, it will of course be better than BetvnFIN.

Jan Angermueller
Elbsound.studio
thank you sir, what is the method to do this kind of things ?

best regards
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OCTO
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Re: Music Type Foundry - new fonts!

Post by OCTO »

odod wrote:thank you sir, what is the method to do this kind of things ?
Mastering FontForge ;)
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jan
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Re: Music Type Foundry - new fonts!

Post by jan »

The method is described in more detail here, but it's mainly what OCTO wrote: Mastering FontForge and its script language
https://elbsound.studio/experiments-in- ... ersion.php

Each glyph is transformed by many FontForge script elements. It looks something like this (this about 30% of the commands used for each symbol):

Select(0x1D191);CorrectDirection();Copy();NewWidth=GlyphInfo("Width");Select(0xF0EC);DetachGlyphs();Paste();SetWidth(NewWidth+-267,0);OldXMin=GlyphInfo("BBox")[0];OldXMax=GlyphInfo("BBox")[2];OldWidth=GlyphInfo("Width");Select(0x1D191);CorrectDirection();Copy();NewWidth=GlyphInfo("Width");Select(0xF0EC);PasteWithOffset(OldWidth,0);UnlinkReference();RemoveOverlap();SetWidth(NewWidth+OldWidth+-267,0); ....

FontForge script is explained here (that's the only reference I used): https://fontforge.github.io/scripting-alpha.html
This screencam video demonstrates the creation of the EuterpeFIN font in realtime: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsoboDOQIkg
Each automatically created script (created by a Finale JW Lua plugin) is about 220kb of size and no manual steps are required afterwards.
Each version I create always starts with the original font. That's why it's for example very easy to include the latest Bravura release: I just need to take the latest font file and it should work fine by default.

Jan
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