What’s wrong with the Leland Font in MuseScore?

[frames]

Convince me Leland is great :-D

I kind of feel that it’s “utilitarian” if you know what I mean. It does the job, but there’s no “elegance” to it.

Maestro, “with a few things fixed” is really my dream font.

I think my biggest niggles for Maestro are the 8th etc. rests - they’re a bit big - and the accents, which are large and open wider than a lot. And then there are the flags, OMG the flags. And the flats could be better. But overall I’m really happy with it, and could live with those things.

Leland fixes those things, but at the expense of having some other issues - the biggest for me is the size of staccato dots - I’ve seen scores online and I go “why are they so small” - and unfortunately you can’t adjust them independently from the other articulations - only make all articulations bigger or smaller (by a percentage). The time signatures are also a bit dark.

MuseScore automatically changes the staff, ledger, stem, and barline widths when you change the font so it’s hard to compare Maestro directly (and if anyone has some good settings for MS to make Maestro look better overall, I’m all ears).

I started looking through other “based on Score” kinds of fonts.

I’ve been through the fonts at Elbsound, and they all have issues that are more problematic for me - weird breath marks, leany treble clefs, squished harmonic diamond noteheads, or “0” harmonics instead of “o” harmonics…gaps between time signature numerals, weird looking 1/4 rests, and so on.

Scorlatti was looking good until I saw the breath marks…(and note, I’m not saying they’re bad or wrong, they’re just not to my taste).

I think it’s possible to make some of your own symbols in MS - I might be able to make a single curly apostrophe and size it right, and copy and paste that as I need it - I guess I could always take a period, and make it bigger, and manually place it over top of every staccato - no, I’m too lazy for that

But if you know fonts that are closer to Score, or like Leland that I can try out, that’d be great too. I can’t seem to find much info on Leland online and it’s not at Elbsound.

TIA for any help/opinions you can provide.

Leland is fine in my opinion (although it's waaaay better than Emmentaler, the former MuseScore default IMO); it's not my favorite font to use, but it's not offensive to me when I look at a part engraved with it. In terms of Score-alike fonts, MTF-Scorlatti is probably going to be the font that's closest to SCORE's original glyphs (for good and bad) and is available for purchase from Notation Central.

As @benwiggy said, there are many fonts available currently (for free and for sale) that are based more on hand-engraved scores: Bravura, which I believe is included with MuseScore and is the default font in Dorico, has a similar heritage as Maestro in that both are based on glyphs from the Not-a-Set dry transfer system, but it also tries to mimic some of the artifacts from non-digital printing processes by having a bolder look in general and by having very few hard corners/sharp angles; there's also Sebastian (by the aforementioned benwiggy) which is based on mid-century plate engraved scores and has a color somewhere in between Maestro and Bravura IMO. I don't believe it comes with MuseScore, but it is available on GitHub and I'm sure Ben or someone else could tell you how to get it to work in MuseScore. Notation Central also has a bunch of paid fonts that are SMuFL-compliant and will work in MuseScore.

[OCTO]

There was a rendering of SCORE to fonts Vienna for Finale and Wolfgang for Sibelius.

So are you saying that the font Vienna basically “is” what Score used, and one would have been able to use it in Finale?

I’ve seen Vienna at Elbsound, so are you saying if I look at that that should give me a good idea of what Score looks like?

No.
SCORE (notation software) never used/had any fonts. It was a pure vector graphic text-based editor for music.

Out of a sample pages made in SCORE, there was a font called Partita created. That font was pretty bad, since it had an extreme number of useless points; generally it was rendered directly from a PDF that was in principle a vector file (i.e. no fonts used).

Out of Partita (font) it was created Vienna for use in Finale about 15 years ago, and thereafter Wolfgang was ported to Sibelius.

About maybe 10 years ago MTF-Scorlatti was created that was somehow emboldened version of Partita (which I like as well).

Lately, MuseScore created Leland. Vienna is more edgy and close to Partita than Leland. Leland is, I would say, "inspired" by Partita rather than a clone.

[OCTO]

Here is a sample with PDF, Wolfang in Sibelius.

PDF
 

[frames]

There was a rendering of SCORE to fonts Vienna for Finale and Wolfgang for Sibelius.

So are you saying that the font Vienna basically “is” what Score used, and one would have been able to use it in Finale?

I’ve seen Vienna at Elbsound, so are you saying if I look at that that should give me a good idea of what Score looks like?

No.
SCORE (notation software) never used/had any fonts. It was a pure vector graphic text-based editor for music.

Out of a sample pages made in SCORE, there was a font called Partita created. That font was pretty bad, since it had an extreme number of useless points; generally it was rendered directly from a PDF that was in principle a vector file (i.e. no fonts used).

Out of Partita (font) it was created Vienna for use in Finale about 15 years ago, and thereafter Wolfgang was ported to Sibelius.

About maybe 10 years ago MTF-Scorlatti was created that was somehow emboldened version of Partita (which I like as well).

Lately, MuseScore created Leland. Vienna is more edgy and close to Partita than Leland. Leland is, I would say, "inspired" by Partita rather than a clone.

Vienna and Wolfgang aren’t really available anymore if I recall correctly, and I don’t believe they were ever made to be SMuFL-compatible.

[odod]

You’re absolutely right, OCTO. What’s truly remarkable about SCORE is its ability to replicate any font. I’ve personally witnessed SCORE being used to mimic SCHOTT’s proprietary music fonts. However, there’s a slight issue that arises when you use the 16th flag. It appears significantly larger and wider.

[LSL2026]

Bravura, which I believe is included with MuseScore and is the default font in Dorico, has a similar heritage as Maestro in that both are based on glyphs from the Not-a-Set dry transfer system, but it also tries to mimic some of the artifacts from non-digital printing processes by having a bolder look in general and by having very few hard corners/sharp angles;

Yeah, I don’t like Bravura. Too bold.

there's also Sebastian (by the aforementioned benwiggy) which is based on mid-century plate engraved scores and has a color somewhere in between Maestro and Bravura IMO.

I was able to download it and use it in MuseScore! Looks good. Nit picky things I don’t like, but you’re right, it does seem to fall between Bravura and Maestro - though so does Leland.

Thanks

[LSL2026]

Out of Partita (font) it was created Vienna for use in Finale about 15 years ago, and thereafter Wolfgang was ported to Sibelius.

Ahhh. So those are as close as one can probably get to Score.

About maybe 10 years ago MTF-Scorlatti was created that was somehow emboldened version of Partita (which I like as well).

Yeah, this is the one I found that I liked the most - even before I knew it was based on Score - I just liked “the look”.

I experimented in MuseScore and what I can do is use Symbols from Leland for things like the Breath Mark (which Scorlatti’s is not the style I want) and possibly make it work.

That said, Leland is not at Elbsound (unless “Lelandia” is a direct port) so I can’t compare them directly. And I use MuseScore for a reason so dropping 80 bucks on it if I’m not sure it’s going to work for me is risky.

Thanks

[LSL2026]

Here is a sample with PDF, Wolfang in Sibelius.
 

Threre’s nothing here I don’t like. Maybe the 5 in the 5/4 looks a bit “too the right”.

Clefs look nice, rests look nice, accidentals look nice, flags look nice. Wish it wasn’t a no key sig score so I could see some key sigs on the transposing instruments but the accidentals in the score look nice.

No “p” - I found some where there was no line at the bottom of the p which I don’t like - I’ll look for it Elbsound just for comparison, as it should also give me an indication of what Score looked like.

But this looks like exactly what I’m used to music looking like - and kind of mostly where I’m trying to get to.

Thanks for the image!

[OCTO]

Here is a sample with PDF, Wolfang in Sibelius.
 

Threre’s nothing here I don’t like. Maybe the 5 in the 5/4 looks a bit “too the right”.

Clefs look nice, rests look nice, accidentals look nice, flags look nice. Wish it wasn’t a no key sig score so I could see some key sigs on the transposing instruments but the accidentals in the score look nice.

No “p” - I found some where there was no line at the bottom of the p which I don’t like - I’ll look for it Elbsound just for comparison, as it should also give me an indication of what Score looked like.

But this looks like exactly what I’m used to music looking like - and kind of mostly where I’m trying to get to.

Thanks for the image!

Thank you.

What I want to point out is that, in my opinion, after experimenting with many fonts, I came to the conclusion that it is not the font itself that makes a score look good.  Rather, it is the combination of note spacing, staff width, the shape of curves, and the overall balance and precision of the engraving.

I have seen fantastic scores engraved with Maestro and even Engraver (font).  At first, I wondered what software and fonts had been used, quickly to discover that they were simply Finale scores using the default fonts.  The secret was a well-balanced, foolproof engraving with as little visual separation between objects and symbols as possible, for example, by choosing the right text font that complements the music font.

So many pay close attention to the fonts, when on the other hand they neglect the true secrets of the music engraving.

Here is an example with "p".
EXAMPLE

[OCTO]

You’re absolutely right, OCTO. What’s truly remarkable about SCORE is its ability to replicate any font. I’ve personally witnessed SCORE being used to mimic SCHOTT’s proprietary music fonts. However, there’s a slight issue that arises when you use the 16th flag. It appears significantly larger and wider.

SCORE had never had a permanent (fixed) output of shapes. Many scores look similar but never the same.
Indeed, you can tweak SCORE in order to mimic Schott's types from 1800.