Finale 27's fonts: a handy guide

[benwiggy]

Just thought I'd talk through the fonts that come with Finale 27, particularly the 'Text' fonts.

The SMuFL-compliant music fonts are: Finale Maestro (2729 glyphs), Finale Engraver (535), Finale Legacy (415); and Finale Jazz (689), Finale Broadway (428), Finale Ash (298).

(Finale Legacy is the new name for the SMuFL-compliant version of Petrucci.) Users of November2 will know that it (and other third-party SMuFL fonts) contains glyphs in the legacy Finale character positions as well as the SMuFL positions. These new Finale fonts do not have legacy glyphs at all. While it could be argued that this would have made the transition smoother (allowing SMuFL fonts to be used in non-SMuFL documents), I'm sure there are reasons for making a clean break.

But also of note are the 'Text" fonts. Other SMuFL fonts have a 'Text' companion font, which is essentially identical, but with the glyphs and bounding boxes scaled suitably to be used in text blocks, such as Tempo metric equations, accidentals in titles (replacing "in B flat"), etc.

Finale has gone its own way somewhat, as the companion text fonts are 'mostly text' -- that is Alphanumerics, diacritics, punctuation, etc -- with some useful music symbols in SMuFL positions. Finale Maestro Text, for example is a 370-glyph clone of Times, with notes, dynamics, clefs, and a few other symbols. Most interestingly, it seems to have some scope for assembling beamed notes, tuplets, and text in boxes.

This makes Finale Maestro Text quite a useful font for things like musicology essays, editorial notes, etc.

Finale Broadway Text (326) appears to be an entirely new handwritten text font, with only notes, accidentals, and chord symbols. Again, there seems to be scope for text in boxes. This font replaces Finale Broadway Legacy Text (296), which matches the old Broadway Text font.

Finale Ash Text (264) and Finale Jazz Text (346) seem to have no music symbols whatsoever.

Despite the paucity of music symbols, Finale has included JSON files for these text fonts, which means that they clutter up Dorico's Music Font selection dialog, which only lists SMuFL fonts. I don't know whether Finale actually needs JSON files for these text fonts, considering their lack of SMuFL glyphs.

The old fonts seem to be entirely unmodified, with exactly the same version numbers as previously.

[NorFonts]

The reason behind JSON format: https://www.json.org/json-en.html

[OCTO]

The SMuFL-compliant music fonts are: Finale Maestro (2729 glyphs),

Well, that is something! Is there any table printed out that we can see the complete symbols? I am not so interested in downloading a demo.

[NorFonts]

Well, that is something! Is there any table printed out that we can see the complete symbols? I am not so interested in downloading a demo.

http://usermanuals.finalemusic.com/Fina ... acter-sets

[benwiggy]

Hmm. The documentation claims that Finale Broadway Legacy Text, Finale Ash Text and Finale Jazz Text are "SMuFL-compliant versions" of the old text fonts -- yet they contain NO SMuFL characters whatsoever. Not even accidentals for titling and instrument names.

Finale Broadway Text contains 16 SMuFL characters.

In a sense, they shouldn't need to, because they are text fonts, and you could just as easily replace them with Adobe Caslon, or Tekton. Finale would (nay, should) still use the Music font for all symbols.