Jazz Font for notes/rests

• Jan 12, 2010 - 03:02

Hi.

I'm just curious if any thought has been given to developing a "hand written" style font for notes rests, etc.

Regards.


Comments

I too would like to see a jazz notation font as well, as I'm trying my hand at arranging a few Christmas carols for a small jazz band.

Fred in St. Louis

Has their been any progress towards making a handwritten jazz notation font?

I've looked around, and there are a number of "free" jazz notation fonts available. However, almost all of them seem to use the Sigler Jazz Font as their basis (the treble clef is very distinctive), so they can't be used.

The Spirral example shows some of the problems with using the "Real Books" as the basis - a lot of the notational elements aren't usable "as is". For example, the 8th note rests look pretty awful. (They look like the digit "7" to me).

The fonts also have to look good with the other rendering features of MuseScore. For example, the lines and beams are all rendered with precision, so mixing a handwritten style with that would look a bit odd.

The bottom line is that most of the font would have to be created from scratch.

I've made some attempts to create a jazz style font based on the examples in the second Real Book, but there are a lot of problems. I don't have any budget for the project, so I've been using Inkscape and FontForge. Inkscape is very nice for editing SVG graphics, but doesn't really have much support for SVG fonts.

FontForge is a very feature-rich program, but it crashes often. For example, loading mscore-20.ttf and then attempting to save it as a .ttf font crashes FontForge. (I'm using the mingw version under Windows). So I'm pretty much stuck.

In reply to by xavierjazz

If I understand correctly, you're referring to "text" fonts - for example, to display note names along the lines of "Cmaj7#11(add2)".

I'm referring to the use of a notational glyphs - noteheads, stems, rests, and so on. The "non-text" elements of the display.

In reply to by dcuny

I know for the trunk, there is now the ability to choose between two different fonts, so at least the potential for plugging in different fonts is there. But I don't think there is any way to actually choose anything but the two options offered, neither of which is a "handwritten" type of font.

BTW, we've made great progress on the MuseJazz font for text, and also on the chord description XML files (above and beyond what was references in the link above). A few other goodies too. There should be some nice improvements for jazz coming soon.

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