How do you add a new Musical Symbols Font, and/or what files are used for the style fonts?

• Feb 2, 2020 - 03:34

I'm currently taking a class regarding film scoring and orchestration taught by an industry professional. An assignment involves setting up a film scoring template, which I'd like to do in MuseScore if possible, as MuseScore is my preferred notation software over Sibelius and Finale. I'd like to change the font for Time Signatures and other symbols to be akin to the example score given to us (screenshot of the time signature below), but I'm not sure how I would go about doing that, and/or if there's any way to just convert a font file that would be used for a word processor to be usable as a style in MuseScore.

I couldn't easily find any information about doing this by googling the information, so hopefully this will be able to be helpful for me and potentially others.

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Comments

You can select an existing time signature and change the scaling and offset in the Inspector:
Time_sig.png

Here's the MuseScore file:
Time_sig.mscz
You can use View -> Show Invisible to see the hidden time signatures on the other staves.

In reply to by sihplak

Fonts for text used in wordprocessing are designed to look good at various sizes - at smaller sizes numbers and/or letters might use bolder lines or curves for better visibility. Larger sizes may require thinner lines/curves. Using the same font, you can verify by magnifying small numbers/letters to make them look larger and compare to unmagnified numbers/letters of a comparable size.
To take Calibri as an example, if you wanted to squish the width (how the large time signature symbols display), you would no longer have the 'Calibri' font.

What you need is to create an image (of Calibri) which then can be stretched/compressed vertically/horizontally without forcing the aspect ratio of width to height as text fonts do. Images can be pasted into scores.
-OR-
Have you tried any of the other MuseScore musical symbols fonts?

In reply to by Jm6stringer

Right; I've looked at the other MuseScore musical symbols fonts. The issue is is I want to figure out how to create or import new ones, e.g. if I wanted to import Finale's music symbols fonts, or make one based on some other typeface.

I definitely know I could paste in an image of numbers to create what I'm looking for, but I feel like that's a more round-about single-use solution to something that I'd like a built-in solution for, that could be used in many other contexts, such as a score that has to use a special musical symbol font for some given reason.

In reply to by sihplak

Importing Finale's music symbols fonts, or making one based on some other proprietary typeface, may engender licensing requirements.
Also, if scores are shared with others who do not share access to your special font(s) - i.e., the font(s) are not part of their MuseScore package - any available font used as a substitute may display inadequately.

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