Issue Changing Fonts - Just rather start over

[SeeJohnsonDrum]

Hi all, first post, though I've used the forum for a while to solve all my Finale issues.

I'm not sure I've found this covered anywhere. I'm working with a few charts that were delivered to me for a book layout. From what I can tell, the composer tried to change the font from Finale Maestro to Finale Broadway but didn't change all of the fonts. So, it's all mismatched.

I've never had success changing fonts in the past, and I always try to make sure I create the file in the font I want and use all of the defaults from the start. I think I'm faced with recreating the engravings for these songs if I can't work out all of the font changes. I tried the fonts utility and ended up with utter jibberish, so I came here.

With that in mind, I was thinking/hoping I could export a music XML (or something like that) without any style info and import the file into a fresh Finale Broadway template and go from there.

Is something like this plausible? I tested it with the XML but got the same exact file, mismatched fonts and all. Maybe importing MIDI would do it?

Thoughts?

[AnneMillington]

Allow me to hasten to assert I am no expert. But I did develop a work flow to handle this issue. First, I have developed a couple of favored templates, with default music and text fonts I want to use, staff and page setup of choice, instrument naming and abbreviating, various spacing and text placement options I like, expression libraries, etc. There is no one single location in the application where all of this minutia can be modified, and I have kept a little cheat sheet of where I made the changes. My templates are in Finale 27.3. Whenever I come up with some other personal preference, I try to add it to the templates.

The work at hand is I have a lot of old 2014 finale files that need to be republished into the newer version, and I want them in one of my templated formats as well. All have the same instrumentation and staff structure, so I don't have to specify that. The first thing I do is bring the old .mus file into finale 27.3 and save it as .musx. I then change the default music font to my SMuFL specification of choice, essentially the one I am using in my template, before I attempt the next step (In Windows, Document>Set Document Music Font). Then I do a plain old copy and paste of that music into my template, and save that as a new .musx.

This takes me about 98.4% of the way toward a satisfactory transfer. There will always be some dithering to do, but far superior to starting over. If there is a simpler way to do this, I would love to know it. I just was not able to find anything in all of the support material.

[SeeJohnsonDrum]

Thanks, this is helpful. I also learned how to use the Change utility to reset the composer's manual changes back to the default positions (especially useful for chords and expressions). All in all, it's been a pain, but I settled for just slogging through it, and I eventually got into a rhythm and was able to make the changes I needed.

[AnneMillington]

Good; I'm glad you figured out how to get it done. Finale is a mouthful of gristle to me, as nothing seems intuitive. And I have worked in IT for decades, and dealt with specialized, cranky software. I actually have expanded my cheat sheet to a cheat document, with headings I can search on, as I keep forgetting the critical little tweaks I need to make things work. I am watching tons of tutorials, and each one gives me a new item in my cheat document. But it is kind of fun, sort of like a puzzle, but the cat tossed a few pieces.