A publishing house is looking at switching to Dorico. They have a custom font they’ve used for decades. Do they need to convert it to SMuFL, or can they just use the Music Symbols Editor? Does the latter have limitations in that regard?
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I’d suggest that they ought to have the font converted to SMuFL. That would be “the Right Thing™” and, once done, would then be easily assigned to any projects.
The alternative requires editing Notehead Sets, Music Symbols, and Tonality systems (for accidentals). I believe that even then, it’s not entirely comprehensive.
They’d be relying on library importing or project templates or .doricolib files, which are perhaps more prone to ‘adjustments’ with successive versions of Dorico.
It’s a bit like when a builder says “Well… we can patch it up a bit for now to make sure no one falls through, or we can do it properly, which will be more work (and mess), but then it will be done.”
I think Sibelius uses a slightly different arrangement from Finale, so even if they went that way, they’d have to do some work.
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OT:
Do you hold the global rights to that, Ben? If so, I’m happy for you (sad for all of us, really) that so few infringe upon them, anywhere, any time.
Ben, how hard is it to convert a font to SMuFL? Is that something that can be easily learned?
It’s not so much difficult as tedious.
As luck would have it, I’ve outlined the process here:
After you’ve done all the work of copying the glyphs to the correct slots (and correct vertical positions); building all the flag notes from bits; making sure that things aren’t going to bump into each other; setting repeat points for repeating symbols like wavy lines; and creating things that aren’t in the original font, like braces and bracket wings: then you’ve got to create the JSON file, which is actually just as simple as running a python script, but you’ve got to get python and the scripts all installed and configured, which does require a bit of woo.
Knut Nergaard has created some new scripts that make it very easy to generate the JSON data, so that’s a plus.
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Great, thanks Ben. I will read through this article, and I might hit you up for some further advice offline. Sounds like the kind of thing that will come up more than once in the coming months. Lots of house fonts out there.
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I’m a little reluctant to offer my services, though I dare say that reluctance could be overcome with suitable quantities of cash.
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Cash does have that effect, doesn’t it?..
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