Finale Forum

Is it impossible to create 12.5 font for lyrics in finale? I am getting a message saying "size must be a number."

I believe the answer in Finale is still ‘no.’ (Other notation software apparently can do it.)

Hi,

it's not possible, however you could get closer size working with non-fixed fonts.

I use one simple method:
imagine you need to input the music on 7 mm staff. This corresponds to 83% scaling (either staff or system) making an assumption, that 96 EVPUs is the original staff high 8.4667 mm.
If you need to get 12.5 fixed p. (Times) the calculation is: 12.5 / 0.83 = 15.06 or approximately 15 p.

The same you can apply for 5 mm (59%): 12.5/0.59 = 21.19 — ca. 21 p. Hence if you apply 21p. you'll get ca. 12.4 fixed
If you accept the compromise to work on 5.08 mm staff (0.60%) then 21p. will become 12.6 p fixed size.
Apparently most of the time the result is approximative, but there is no alternative way except creating your own font that should be ca. 4.16% bigger than the normal one. BTW, not all fonts look equally compared one by one when the speech specially goest to the so called "x" hight.

All these calculation make sense if you need "real" 12.5 p (in other words "fixed" font size).
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There is another approach - completely opposite one:
this time you'll need 12.5 p floating (scalable size, commonly used for text expression etc.).
Let's set the staff hight again to ca. 7 mm, but if you accept 6.77 mm. the calculation will be 100% what you'll need.
If you apply 10p fixed size, the result will be exactly 12.5 p.(scalable font size)

The same compromise you can do with orchestral score staff (ca. 5 mm), but this time instead of 59% you'll need to set the value to 56% (4.75 mm )
In order to get 12.5 you'll have to input the text with 7 p. fixed.

It depends on you to find the balance. But first you have to answer to these questions:
"do I really need 12.5 p", and if YES, then "shell I suffer the staff high"
otherwise the "responsibility" for all approximations goes to the font size as explained within first method.
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There are some (French/UK) publishers that require fixed fonts in their production. It's not an issue at all for Sibelius, but for us, the Finale users, this is not comfortable.
I am not going to criticise the software itself since there are number of issues spotting on first place the unacceptable sluggish behaviour involving overcrowded scores with more than 20 staves.
Sibelius is limited as options, there is no graphic editor at all, (and I do not use it), but compared to Finale side by side, it flays with hypersonic speed...
From other hand, non-integer sizes (talking about fonts) are widely used nowadays and it's not a surprise for me that a colleague is looking for help in this regard.