Now Open: Music Type Foundry

The time has come, the wait is over!

The day has come to begin another chapter in my life. Before I do that, I just want to thank everyone for their support over that past few years. This has been a tremendous journey for me. I'd especially like to thank Urs Liska for his kindness, his generosity in sharing some server space and hosting fonts.openlilylib.org (which is no more) and providing so much musical expertise to myself and the music engraving community as a whole.

And now, I'm very excited to announce that I have officially made the move to a brand-new web store: Music Type Foundry, a dedicated site to serve all my alternative music notation fonts. Each product page is full of a variety of example scores so you can get a taste for what they look like in action in different styles of scores. The goal is to support users of all the major music scoring applications where possible (LilyPond, Sibelius, Finale, and Dorico). Not all fonts will be supported on all applications. The store is currently only providing fonts for LilyPond, but the others are in the works and I hope to have more support for the others by Q4 2016.

So what's new? 

All the fonts in the store have been updated and improved in one way or another. Individual glyphs have been updated. Stylesheets have been improved. Some of them are now under commercial licenses and the name has been prefixed with "MTF" so users know the difference. I haven't uploaded ALL the fonts that were there before, though I intend to eventually.

Introducing...

I am pleased to officially announce a brand-new font: MTF-Arnold!

(Image courtesy of Music Type Foundry)

(An Alban Berg excerpt, engraved by Urs Liska, lilypondblog.org)


This gorgeous 20th century revival design has all the finesse and beauty of classic Universal Edition scores. Readers of this blog can get 20% off this fantastic font all the way through October. Just enter the code LEIGHVERLAG at checkout to receive the discount.

What Am I Working On?

At the moment, I am hard at work--given the small amount of time I have each day for it--to make many of the current set of fonts available to Sibelius, Finale, and (future) Dorico users. This sure is helping me appreciate the SMuFL standard (thanks, Daniel Spreadbury!).

One thing that I've mentioned in previous posts that I am most excited about is creating Multiple Master (MM) professional fonts (i.e., optical fonts) of each of my designs so that users get more appropriately designed/weighted glyphs for printing at smaller/larger sizes. For LilyPond, these will be at the usual standard set of staff sizes: 11, 13, 14, 16, 18, 20 (default), 23, and 26pt. For other apps, there will likely be just two sizes since they don't really support more than that (and some not even that, at least not in the same score): a standard size and an "ossia" size. The SMuFL standard supports these two sizes within the same file, but I'm not sure when any of the apps will actually be able to use them like that.

I've also got some other LilyPond tips and tutorials that I hope to post here soon.

If you notice anything amiss on the site--any links that are broken or missing, any instructions that aren't clear, and especially if any fonts aren't working--please don't hesitate to let me know. You may even get a little something in return ;-)