In this article, I will discuss the migration issues regarding music fonts, which greatly affect the appearance of music scores.
This is a problem that particularly affects the entire music publishing industry in Japan, which has used Finale as the industry standard music notation tool for many years.
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What are music fonts?
Many of you may have noticed that the overall feel of your scores has changed significantly when you migrated files from Finale to Dorico.
This is partly due to differences in software and settings, but the main reason is that the music fonts used are different.
Music fonts are fonts used to display musical symbols such as treble clef, quarter notes, forte, and coda.
They can basically be used in the same way as normal text fonts, and as long as you know the input chords, you can use them not only in music notation software, but also in text editors and word processing software.
The English version of Finale includes Finale Maestro as a music font, while the Japanese version includes Kousaku, Kousaku Percussion, and Rentaro in addition to English music fonts.
Plus, the Japanese version of Finale also widely uses a third-party music font called Chaconne, and Kousaku and Chaconne have been the standard for Japanese published music for many years.
Meanwhile, Dorico includes Bravura as a music font and uses it by default. As shown in the image at the beginning of this article, Bravura has a slightly thicker appearance than Kousaku, the music font of the Japanese version of Finale.
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SMuFL-compatible music fonts
Music fonts have traditionally been created according to their own specifications, but in recent years, SMuFL fonts based on an international standard called SMuFL (Standard Music Font Layout) have been provided.
There are three main advantages to SMuFL fonts. The first is that a large number of symbols, approximately 3,000 in total, are now available, and the second is that these symbols are compatible with music notation software that supports SMuFL.
In other words, even if you have created special symbols yourself using the shape designer in Finale, if there is a similar symbol among the large number of SMuFL symbols, you can use that symbol to transfer to other music notation software that supports SMuFL via MusicXML.
(Although compatibility is not fully implemented at present, it is expected that performance will improve in the future.)
The following two screenshots show the SMuFL symbol selection window for Finale v27 and Dorico Pro 5, respectively. You can see that the symbol “U+E000” is assigned to the selected “Brace” in both cases.
The definition of this U+E000 can be found on the website of the organization that manages SMuFL fonts, W3C.
【Finale v27】
【Dorico Pro 5】
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Dorico cannot use Kousaku and other fonts as standard music fonts
The third advantage of SMuFL fonts is that in music notation software that supports SMuFL, you can use SMuFL-compatible music fonts from other companies as the standard music font used globally (hereinafter referred to as “standard music font”) for the entire score file.
At present, music notation software that supports SMuFL includes Finale, Dorico, and MuseScore. For example, Finale Maestro and Leland, which were originally Finale and MuseScore music fonts, can be used as standard music fonts in Dorico.
However, music fonts such as Kousaku, Kousaku Percussion, Rentaro, and Chaconne, which have been widely used in the Japanese music publishing industry, are not currently SMuFL compatible fonts, so they cannot be used as standard music fonts in Dorico.
Among the SMuFL-compatible music fonts, I think the one that has the closest taste to these is Finale Maestro, which I introduced at the end of the previous article, and this can be set in Dorico in “Library menu > Music Fonts”.
Finale Maestro is based on Maestro, which was the standard music font for the English version of Finale, and was included as a SMuFL-compatible music font from v27.
The shapes of each symbol are slightly different from those of Kousaku and Chaconne, but since Kousaku and Chaconne are not yet SMuFL-compatible, it seems best to use Finale Maestro instead of Bravura for the time being if you want to create music scores similar to those of Finale in Dorico.
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How to use non-SMuFL music fonts such as Kousaku in Dorico
When changing music fonts, the thing that is particularly bothersome is the segno and coda marks, whose shapes are very different between Western and Japanese styles.
The Finale Maestro font in Finale v27 has Japanese segno and coda marks in the “Alternative symbols, etc.” category, perhaps with Japanese users in mind.
Dorico also has “Japanese” marks, but their shapes are slightly different from the Japanese marks we have seen.
I don’t know whether the coda marks are intentionally designed in this way, but not only are their shapes simplified, but they are also asymmetrical up, down, left, and right upon closer inspection. The segno mark is actually just a rotated version of the original Western style, and its shape is exactly the same as the Western style.
When you place Dorico's “Japanese” mark on actual music, it looks like this.
By the way, it is possible to place Kousaku and Rentaro symbols, for which keyboard input commands are known, on Dorico music, at least as text.
The input commands for Kousaku and Rentaro are listed in the PDF file “Finale Keymap” in the “Documentation” folder of the Finale installer.
If you don't like these marks built into Dorico, you can hide the symbols you entered as repeat markers and write the original Japanese symbols by Kousaku on top of them as “staff text” in Dorico. Then the marks will look like Kousaku font marks, and the order of performance will be reflected in playback.
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Solutions for the Japanese Music Publishing Industry
As mentioned above, Kousaku and Chaconne are music fonts that have been used in the Japanese music publishing industry for many years, but the fact that they cannot be used as standard music fonts in Dorico may be a serious problem for the Japanese music publishing industry, which is forced to consider switching to Dorico in the medium to long term.
As shown in the above example of segno and coda, it is technically possible to use Kousaku and Chaconne symbols in Dorico on a spot basis, but it is not realistic to rewrite elements that appear in large quantities on the score, such as note heads, one by one.
In that case, I think one solution would be to continue using Finale until it can be used on older OSes, and in the meantime, to have the industry work together to negotiate with the rights holders of each font to make Kousaku and Chaconne SMuFL so that they can be used in Dorico.
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Addendum (October 10, 2024)
Just after publishing this article, I received a good news today. Chaconne Ex, a music font that converts Chaconne, the standard for Japanese music publishing, into SMuFL, will be available for sale from October 31, 2024.
Of course, as mentioned in this article, this is a SMuFL-compatible font, so it can be used in Dorico. It seems safe to say that the music font problem for the Japanese music publishing industry has been resolved before it actually became apparent.
I’d like to review how Chaconne Ex works on Dorico later soon.