Choral arrangers, what fonts do you use?

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MikeHalloran
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Post by MikeHalloran » Wed Jul 04, 2018 2:04 pm

I am at that age where no set of eyeglasses can restore the vision of my youth. I get by very well but...

In the past few months, I have had to sing works composed/arranged in Finale from three people. Their scores were damned near unreadable. It wasn't that they were too small... In fact, I open a hymnal with smaller staves and have no problem. In the score last Sunday, I was hitting wrong notes (during the run-through) because they looked like other pitches. A Db was indistinguishable from middle C — as I moved the score closer and further, the note appeared to change. I was not alone—others were complaining as well. Because of my handicap, I do not have the luxury of holding music as I sing and Manhasset stands aren't as tall as I would like.

I've asked two of the three to email me their Finale files, both done in 25, so that I can try layout and font substitutions. I got one this morning but haven't looked at it yet—still waiting on the one that gave me grief Sunday.

So, my question: What fonts and sizes do you use for notes and text in choral works?
Mike Halloran

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dankreider
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Post by dankreider » Wed Jul 04, 2018 2:16 pm

Well, for our hymnal, I used 10-point Minion Pro. It's been very well received, even by our older folks.

I like Minion Pro because it has a proportionately tall x-height (the height of the lowercase characters). That makes it much easier to read than, say Garamond. Also, it's a little darker (stroke weight).

I've been so pleased with it that I'm probably going to keep it for all future projects that involve lyrics.
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dankreider
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Post by dankreider » Wed Jul 04, 2018 2:33 pm

Mike, here's one example (attached), if it's helpful. We have been singing from our hymnal for several years now, and I think it's proved to be very legible overall. YMMV.

Note that, because of a lot of resizing in the file, the *actual* font size ends up being around 9.8. If I were to do it over again, I would change the whole resizing thing. :-(
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BuonTempi
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Post by BuonTempi » Wed Jul 04, 2018 3:40 pm

You might find the larger noteheads of Engraver or Maestro Wide to be more helpful. There's also a balance to be struck between the noteheads and the thickness of the staff lines: too thin and you can't tell where the notes sit; too thick and it's a big inky mess.

A vocal score of around 15pt high (1/5 inch) is pretty standard. You may find that increasing this by even just 1pt clarifies matters.

Lyrics are a special case, as they have to disrupt the note spacing as little as possible while still being legible. Minion is a good choice, because it has a set of 'Caption' Optical sizes, which are designed to be crisp and clear at small point sizes, rather than just scaling down. Other Adobe Pro fonts have these sizes.

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N Grossingink
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Post by N Grossingink » Wed Jul 04, 2018 4:26 pm

Additionally, try making the ledger lines wider (stick out of noteheads more) and a bit thicker. I think many engravers agree that ledger lines should be slightly thicker than staff lines. Keep the adjustments tiny, "just a gnat's whisker".

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Peter Thomsen
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Post by Peter Thomsen » Wed Jul 04, 2018 8:41 pm

Some other font ideas for lyrics:

Palatino

Caslon

Note, By The Way, that you should not compare different fonts at the same Point size.
Instead, compare the fonts at Point sizes where they look as if they had the same size.
When you e. g. compare Palatino with another font, try a smaller Point size for Palatino than for the other font, to make the two fonts look the same size.
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Simon_Furey
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Post by Simon_Furey » Sat Jul 07, 2018 6:10 pm

Before I say what fonts I use, it's worth noting what I am doing and why, because fonts are just part of the bigger picture. I should also point out that I too have crap eyesight (cataracts) so I need my scores for my own use!

Almost all of my stuff is SATB unaccompanied, and the battle I always have is to squeeze things on to the page. I absolutely hate loads of white space that causes people to be forever turning pages, which is a pain the proverbial especially when there are longish repeated sections. All of my scores are on A4 paper size, portrait, and my general target is three systems to a page, each system with as many bars as I can sensibly cram in without clutter. I use the standard Finale defaults for the notes, but I use Arial Narrow 14pt bold for the lyrics (I can already hear the gasps and snorts from people who insist on serif fonts!). To get three systems to a page, I frequently have to scale the system size down to 85%, but this in no way affects legibility of the lyrics.

Arial Narrow enables me to produce very clear lyrics in European languages with diacritics, specifically Catalan, Castilian (Spanish), Portuguese, French and Italian. Diacritic clarity is very important in my work, and serif fonts are simply not good enough, especially with the letter i. I should also add that the clarity of my scores is much appreciated by the several local choirs that use them, which have a high proportion of older people with imperfect vision. I know this from their feedback. I have tried other fonts, both serif and non-serif, but I keep coming back to Arial Narrow as the best compromise between density and clarity. I recognise that most of the folks on the forum are likely to be doing just English (and possible Latin) stuff, so my criteria don't necessarily apply to you, but that's my position.

Incidentally, I use a modified version of Arial Narrow (called ArialNarrow), since Microsoft screwed up the handling of the original font in Windows Vista and still haven't corrected it. The effect of the bug in Finale is to lose the "Narrow" attribute, so that it comes out as full-width Arial. My version fixes that and is otherwise identical.

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