Half-note heads.

In Ten Music Notation Programs (pdf) I notice that Dorico’s minims are no wider than the crotchets, unlike those in Sibelius, Notion and MuseScore. (However I appreciate that their central space is elliptical rather than straight-sided.)

This is a problem when reading speckly printouts at a distance in poor lighting…
Is this true of all supplied fonts? If so, can they be modified graphically?

Many Peters scores have fatter minims, as do Novello’s typeset ones.
Not to mention hymn books where the minim is a semibreve with a stem!

Go to Engrave mode and call up the Nothead Set Editor. You may be able to get what you want here. You can resize noteheads or use any symbol you want. You can make a semibreve with a stem if you like as well.

The Bravura font doesn’t include any wider versions of the minim/half note notehead, I’m afraid. I must say that I’ve not ever been aware of seeing minim noteheads wider than crotchet ones, and none of the fonts I ever worked on for Sibelius ever followed that principle.

I checked my Sibelius 6.2: on screen there is no difference but in the printouts I mentioned there is, certainly very slight, but with a subliminal effect. Perhaps slightly enlarging the white centre would do; I like Dorico’s crotchets, though.

I looked in a font editor at the Opus fonts to remind myself, and the white noteheads are the same size as the black ones, as I said, but it is true that the Opus white notehead has a larger counter than the Bravura one.

Daniel, that statement about Opus seems odd, because when “faking” a colliding quarter and half note with stems in opposite directions in Sibelius by hiding the black quarter notehead, IIRC you have to nudge the stem sideways to make it attach to the half notehead correctly.

(I’m not going to re-learn how to use Sibelius just to check this out, though!)