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 ;-)

Mimicking the Real Book Look

Stop! If you have never heard of "Real Book" or "Fake Book", go look it up and then come back.

(no really, go ahead... I'll wait for you...)

Done? Good. Now, hopefully you are more familiar with what a Real Book score looks like, so let's move forward.

A Small Holiday Gift

So, I've not been able to keep this blog as up-to-date as I'd like to. To remedy that a little, here's a small holiday gift to you. This gift was originally given by Mark Adler on the Finale Blog, but since he offered it freely, I decided to pass it along, with a little extra for all the LilyPond users out there.

Quick Summer 2015 Update

It seems like I've been out of the loop for too long, so I thought I'd post a quick update with info about what I've been up to.

Recent Developments

Wow, over a whole month has gone by without a post. Well, I've been busy working on myriad of (mostly font-related) projects. I'm still not quite done with most of them, but here are some highlights of my latest adventures that will hopefully be released soon:

Font Update (Improviso, Ross, Profondo)

Another set of updates have been applied and are now available on my font site: fonts.openlilylib.org. Here are the highlights:

• Improviso (v1.1)
• Fixed a bad contour in the clefs.C_change glyph.
• Packaged three hand-written text fonts (one of my own creation) to compliment the font style.
• Ross (v1.1)
• Thickened up the scripts.tenuto articulation (which also updated the up and down portato).
• Added information about the IM FELL text fonts.
• Profondo (no version change)
• Packaged my tuplet number font so the style is more consistent (the glyphs come from Bravura). The \override is now part of the default profondo.ily stylesheet.

If you haven't been over there in a while, go check them out and let me know if something is not working correctly!

Do you have a score that uses one of your favorite music fonts? Let me know so I can add it as an example on the respective font page!

Happy Engraving!

Engraver Spotlight: David Stephen Grant

I was recently introduced to the composer/engraver David Stephen Grant, who shared with me a very lovely score he had composed and engraved using LilyPond. The score is done with my Ross music font (and accompanying stylesheet), complimented perfectly by the IM Fell English text font.

David shared with me some background to the score:

... "Overture to Bérénice" was actually used as an Overture to a modern theatre production of Racine's "Bérénice" that I composed and contributed sound design for. The music quickly moved from this "Baroque" atmosphere into more noisy electronic sound design, ...

Great job, David, and thanks for sharing this with us!

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Have you engraved something you'd like to feature here that shows off one of my music fonts? Let me know or provide a link in the comment section!

Update to fonts website!

I'm proud to announce a few nice updates to fonts.openlilylib.org today! I had wanted to make some changes and add a few things since the last major update and I finally got around to it. Here are the changes:

• Updated fonts: A few fonts had "hole" artifacts from overlapping contours when using certain programs to view the glyphs (such as Inkscape, Adobe Acrobat PDF, etc.). These have now been fixed and any future use of these glyphs should result in the proper forms. Specifically, the fonts affected by this update are: Beethoven, Improviso, LilyJAZZ, Ross, and Scorlatti. If you notice any others, let me know!


• Font stylesheets: A few minor additions to the stylesheets have been included and on each page there is now a direct link to the respective stylesheet itself for easier viewing and downloading.


• Font viewer: I've added a convenient way to quickly look through the main glyphs in each font and compare them to others. This is what I'd wanted to do for some time and now it's finally here. Go check it out!



• Documentation: All documentation about installation and usage that used to be on the main page has been moved to a dedicated page to keep the landing page simpler. As always, if a link is broken, I want to hear about it.

I always am trying to improve the look-and-feel of the page, so you may see some minor changes there too. Are things working on your machine/browser? Do you like the changes? Let me know in the comments!

New Music Font: Sebastiano

So, I've actually had this done for a little while, but just hadn't released it yet. This new font is a OFL derivative of a (basically) non-public OFL-licensed font designed by engraver/composer Florian Kretlow (github source). It follows what I call the "inky" look, where internal corners (at least some of them) get "rounded" by what would have been caused by the capillary action of the liquid ink. Here's a sample (click to see a full-size PDF).

I think the font itself is quite nice. It has some inconsistencies that bother me a little, though. For example, the default flat symbol is thicker in the stem than inside the eyelet. The second f in the "sffz" ligature is different from the first. Having these inconsistencies doesn't make the font BAD, per se, just not to my taste.

Fortunately, in the source files, there were a bunch of other variants in his source files that were more to my liking. Here's the same score as above, but with my selected variants, as done in LilyPond.

The new font is available at fonts.openlilylib.org. Go get it! Here's a more extensive example: Grieg's Piano Concerto in A-minor, Second Movement.

No Music Font Industry?

You may know of my involvement with designing alternative music fonts for LilyPond. Ever since I was able to get these fonts to work, I have often wondered why there aren't more music notation fonts out there. The most common seem to be:

• Maestro (Finale)
• Petrucci (Finale)
• Opus (Sibelius)
• Helsinki (Sibelius)
• Jazz & Swing (Sigler)
• Sonata (Adobe)
• Bravura (Steinberg)

There are definitely others out there, but as I've looked through the various notation software, most have one, maybe two, music fonts. There is an ocean of text fonts, but not for music fonts. Why is this? I can only speculate that it is because of a couple of reasons:

1. No common character set standard (like Unicode or ASCII). Most music fonts have followed the mnemonic approach of Sonata, like putting the treble clef in the "&" character spot, the sharp accidental in the "#" character spot, etc. Recently, Steinberg's Daniel Spreadbury has been hard at work trying to change this and create a complete music glyph standard that will support nearly any conceivable notation element, ancient and modern. This standard is called the "Standard Music Font Layout" or SMuFL. If this catches on, it could open up the door to a host of designers.
2. A relatively small user base. Let's face it, there are more people who are going to type up a document with words in it (I'll call them "typesetters") than there are people who are going to type up a document with music in it (I'll call them "engravers"). Since the proportion of engravers to typesetters is extremely small, there doesn't appear to be the same kind of demand for original music typefaces, so high quality designers don't spend much time in it.
3. Typeface styles/Contextual Purpose. In text, there are so many variants and they all have their own usefulness (light, book, italic, bold, black, serif, sans-serif, monospace, etc.). However, music notation has a specific utility for conveying performance instructions to musicians. The music font (as well as the rest of the score) must be clear so that the musician can play it correctly. Musicians expect this and get quite frustrated when the music is not clear. Since notational elements already vary widely in weight and shape, it is hard to find a correlation to the very many text typeface variants. In that sense, and in my experience, music fonts are MUCH easier to design because there is pretty much just the one glyph set. The only variants to be found are the text-related ones like tuplet numbers. The two main font styles that seem to exist for music fonts are "engraved" and "handwritten". The handwritten fonts tend to be associated with a "jazzy" feel, and basically everything else gets the classic engraved look. 

Well, that's all I can think of for now. Maybe the industry will change, especially as there are more and more self-publishers who may seek a less generic look for their scores. In any case, creating music fonts for LilyPond has given me a chance to contribute to the small pool of high quality music font industry. Who knows where that will lead me?