Hi everyone, first post here!
For those interested in music font design: I’ve got a copy of the Sibelius manual from the ’90s, written by Ben and Jonathan Finn when it was the new kid on the notation software block. Aside from being a generally great read, I was interested to see that the musical examples were typeset using an Opus font that looks quite different to the font that modern-day Sibelius uses. I’ve attached a few scans of short extracts, where you can see a much more upright and rounded treble clef, as well as different flat accidentals and significantly straighter quaver flags:
Extract 2 shows slightly different dynamic markings, particularly for mezzo:
Extract 3 has a fuller brace that curves away at the ends from the staves, rather than clamping on as modern day Opus does:
You can also see these glyphs in many of the pieces published in the ’90s by Faber on the score previews on their website.
However, there are also extracts set in a font that looks a lot closer to the current-day Opus, which can be seen in Extract 4:
The font listed in my edition of the manual (edition 3.5, published in 1997) is stated as being OpusIV, which suggests that the Opus font went through several revisions in the first few years following Sibelius’ public release. I’ve re-typeset Extract 4 using the current version of Sibelius Ultimate which highlights that there are still some notable differences in the glyphs, mainly that the quaver flags are much more fluid in OpusIV and don’t have that crook in the tail that current-day Opus does.
The treble clef can be made to look almost exactly the same if you rotate it a bit, I wonder why?
I don’t know what everyone else thinks, but the versions of the Opus font used on the Rise OS look much nicer to me than the version of Opus used today that was introduced when Sibelius made the jump to Windows and Mac. I was wondering if anyone on the forum had experience of working with Sibelius back on Acorn computers or knew about the reasons for the changes made to the Opus font over the years? I’d be interested to know.
There are also two others fonts mentioned in the manual, Rameau (described as having a traditional ‘plate-engraved look’) and Manuscript (a font mimicking handwriting, possibly in the same way many of the current ‘jazz’ fonts do), but there aren’t any pictures on them in the manual and I can’t find mention of them at all online — anyone know anything about these?
Opus font: Sibelius 7 Acorn Rise OS versions
Re: Opus font: Sibelius 7 Acorn Rise OS versions
This font looks much better, similar to Ross. Interesting!
Today's Opus is, in my opinion, a disaster in almost every aspect. If I could, I would ban scores using Opus.
Today's Opus is, in my opinion, a disaster in almost every aspect. If I could, I would ban scores using Opus.

Finale 27.5 • Sibelius 2024.3• MuseScore 4+ • Logic Pro X+ • Ableton Live 12+ • Digital Performer 11 /// MacOS Monterey (secondary in use systems: Fedora 35, Windows 10)
Re: Opus font: Sibelius 7 Acorn Rise OS versions
The treble clef in today's Opus is grotesque. That would have been part of my (pre-Dorico) decision not to use Sibelius, except that the program had a switch to use the original Adobe Sonata font, with its own glyph mapping.
John Rethorst
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Re: Opus font: Sibelius 7 Acorn Rise OS versions
It’s perfectly possible to change one or more single glyphs in Sibelius, and of course it’s easy to select an entire different font.
I used to change the parenthesized accidentals to bracketed accidentals (for critical editions). I used to change the clefs as well.
I used to change the parenthesized accidentals to bracketed accidentals (for critical editions). I used to change the clefs as well.
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Re: Opus font: Sibelius 7 Acorn Rise OS versions
I'm running Sibelius7 V3.53 in a RISC OS emulator on my Windows machine. From old floppies I've managed to get copies of OpusII (which doesn't work), OpusIII and OpusIV as well as Manuscript and Rameau. Here is the trumpet line set in each of those:
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Re: Opus font: Sibelius 7 Acorn Rise OS versions
Ah amazing! Really interesting to see, thanks so much for uploading these. It’s funny, both Rameau and Manuscript have really nice treble clefs. It’s a shame they weren’t brought over to the Windows & Mac era, especially as, agreeing with jrethorst, the changes made to the Opus treble clef are a bit strange.struwwelpeter wrote: ↑08 Aug 2025, 17:38 I'm running Sibelius7 V3.53 in a RISC OS emulator on my Windows machine. From old floppies I've managed to get copies of OpusII (which doesn't work), OpusIII and OpusIV as well as Manuscript and Rameau. Here is the trumpet line set in each of those:
OPUSIII.jpg
OPUSIV.jpg
rameau.jpg
manuscr.jpg
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Re: Opus font: Sibelius 7 Acorn Rise OS versions
I’ve been playing around with trying to recreate OpusIV in the current version of Sibelius by rotating and combing glyphs from various Sib and Finale fonts. It’s not quite there, but it’s been interesting to see all the tweaks that were made to the font in various revisions. For example, the quaver rest in the old version of Opus (and Rameau) is exactly the same as the one in the modern Helsinki font, while modern Opus uses a slightly different glyph.
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Re: Opus font: Sibelius 7 Acorn Rise OS versions
Here are the character sets for the three fonts:
If anyone knows a better way of generating glyph sets on RISCOS please let me know!
If anyone knows a better way of generating glyph sets on RISCOS please let me know!
Re: Opus font: Sibelius 7 Acorn Rise OS versions
I'm guessing that RISC OS didn't use font formats that can be copied over to Win/Mac.. Can you print from the emulator to a PDF print queue? That way, you could get the vector glyphs into 2025.
I'll ask Ben Finn why these fonts never made it to the non-Acorn ports.
(My favourite fact about the Archimedes is that the original OS was named "Arthur", which apparently stood for "Acorn RISC OS by Thursday".)
I'll ask Ben Finn why these fonts never made it to the non-Acorn ports.
(My favourite fact about the Archimedes is that the original OS was named "Arthur", which apparently stood for "Acorn RISC OS by Thursday".)