I happen to think that Petaluma is fabulously readable and it gives me the warm fuzzies… 
Same. I like it because it just has that relaxed feel to it which is imho more fitting for most leadsheets than print styles like Bravura. Scores are a different matter, though.
Ah! Nice to hear I’m not the only one. I make more sight reading mistakes when I have to read a “traditional” big band chart than with a fake hand written one, and Petaluma is up to now my favourite.
FWIW, I recently made some simple (“lead sheet+”) quintet arrangements for a group that included a player with some vision impairment (macular degeneration). That urged me to avoid my 30+ year habit of handwritten-style fonts in my jazz works and use Bravura* for the music text (instead of the Petaluma I had been using in Dorico).
I found that with the text and chord-symbol fonts I used (not Academico), I (as a reading member of the ensemble) missed the “visual jazz vibe” of the music font less than I would have expected after all those years. (And I know it was the right choice for my bandmate to help him be able to read as he navigates this frustrating change.)
Cherished practices can be tough to give up, but I suspect I’ll continue to do my jazz work this new way.
* Setting Engraving Options > Notes to Larger Noteheads also made a big difference in legibility for my bandmate. (Which now makes me wonder about the practice of smaller-type footnotes…)
Fun fact: “Larger Noteheads” is always Bravura.
I’ve always hated sheet music with thin staff lines, and therefore I can’t stand the vast majority of horrendous Finale output. With my deteriorating eyesight I’m more and more often tempted to re-input parts in Dorico to make them legible. Finale is not made by musicians, and it shows. Dorico is a godsend for doing this right out of the box.
Staff lines, bar lines and stems are part of the music and should match the blackness to be coherent. I bet Tufte is not a musician who ever had to read stuff from a distance while playing. Can he even read music at all? Idiot.
And, in fact, Larger Noteheads is the default notehead set in Dorico.
Over the years, Finale did make their default staff lines a little thicker.
I have exactly the same problem with “traditional, engraved” music fonts. I also have visual challenges due to my cataract surgery, which turned out differently than planned. The difference in visual deviation between my left and right eye is much greater than expected, resulting in a significant discrepancy in my eyeglass lenses: -2.25 on the left and -6.5 on the right. I find it much easier to work with handwritten jazz fonts. So in my case, it’s not that cherished practices are tough to give up, but I can do my work much better with fake-handwritten fonts.
It was a product of the move from traditional printing, where the ink soaks in and spreads, to the nascent laser printer technology, where there’s no such dot gain. The need to compensate with thicker lines got overlooked with the excitement of being able to churn out an ‘engraved’ page in minutes, rather than a great many hours. Plus the 80s aesthetic of crisp lines on super white paper.
I’m probably missing something funny here, but the initial draft I made was with Bravura Default size noteheads, which was much harder for my bandmate to read.
What am I mis(s/understand)ing, @benwiggy?
In a vanilla Dorico installation, “Larger noteheads” is the default setting here
That, I’m sure is an overstatement. But in this particular case I’ll certainly agree on “ignorant.”
Daniel discussed the evolution of this here:
Thanks for that link, @FredGUnn! That was just after I started using Dorico seriously and hadn’t yet become a more dedicated forum reader.
It’s commonly known as “Defeat by the default not being the default”.
I admit defeat, and must now get up on de feet and inch my way towards other work. Thanks again, all. (All that from a footnote, no less!)
In five years I never changed something about the size of the noteheads, I didn’t even knew it was an option. I just checked, and it’s set to larger! So somehow, Dorico set my noteheads larger by default. I like it this way, so I’ll keep it. Btw: I decided for Bravura, not Sebastian. To my eyes Bravura is more balanced, less euh: I can’t think of an English word, less circus-like, more rest. Less distraction.
) at some point in the past or that came from the Scoring Express template I used.