Finale Forum

I've been looking into different kinds of music and text fonts, and I've gotten a lot of helpful insights from engravers about different stylistic choices.

I hear a lot of people say they use one font for noteheads, another for stems, another for clefs, etc.

Personally, I'd like to change out the "p" in November. Even more importantly, I'd like to take from each font set those characters I like best.

I get how to create custom expressions. But how do I swap out things like noteheads and clefs and accidentals?

Thanks!
Dan

Document options / Fonts

Facepalm, thanks.

For some reason, I thought it was harder.

dankreider wrote:Personally, I'd like to change out the "p" in November. Even more importantly, I'd like to take from each font set those characters I like best.

You could make your own custom font, using a font editor to copy in those glyphs from other fonts that you prefer. One of my clients has done exactly that and it provides the look that they're after. However, all music fonts are under copyright and such an approach is technically illegal, especially when the resulting music files are used to produce commercially available music sold for profit. If you want to go this route, I'd suggest you contact a professional font designer for advice and creation of the actual finished fonts. Making a properly constructed and encoded font that will work forever is nothing to play around with. One such person is Abraham Lee at Music Type Foundry https://www.musictypefoundry.com/. Another is Stephen Powell at DVM Publications http://dvmpublications.com/index.htm.

My advice - as your main music font, pick a font that has noteheads that you like. One problem, all noteheads must be "liked" - there is no way to mix and match fonts for individual noteheads in Finale, as far as I know. Same thing with rests, flags and other notational elements - pick one font for each notational category (see Document Options > Fonts). Then, you can mix and match to your heart's content each Expression and Articulation. Just specify the font in the designer box - an accent from here, downbow from there, p from here, mf from there, and so on.

Hopefully others will add additional suggestions.

N.

Thanks, that's exactly what I was wondering.

Darn that "p" in November. No way I want to get into creating fonts!

I'll probably end up doing what you suggested: mixing and matching articulations and customizing tempo/expressions.