Hi - I was using MTF Gutenberg and EB Garamond from Notation Central as a music - text font combination. I updated to the latest release 3.113 of these fonts by following the steps from Notation Central - and my perception was that my rehearsal marks went from square border to very tall rectangle, and the border of the instrument name also changed to a very large square with no instrument name visible.
Please, has anyone experienced this ?
Is my perception some “finger trouble” / user error or is there a real issue?
It have returned to Bravura / Academico (which is totally fine - the Gutenberg / EB Garamond was a nice change but not essential).
You’re not the first to talk about tall rectangles this week… I think the culprit is the font (its specifications, especially ascenders and descenders) so you should be able to keep MTF Gutenberg as SMuFL, but you should probably switch to Academico, Nepomuk or Splentino as default text font.
Sounds like you used the music font for the rehearsal marks. Music fonts in general have much bigger bounding boxes than normal text fonts, making the alphanumeric characters inside them unsuitable for ordinary text, and a RM is still just text.
I would take FontLab’s recommendation with a pinch of salt. There’s all kinds of competing standards and guidelines about whether to use Line Gaps, or not; and some say that it’s better to have an Ascender value that includes the highest point in the font, rather than the actual “Ascender” height. Also, families have to have the same metrics, so you may need to keep ascenders constant across a range of styles.
Sure, FontLab’s recommended metrics are not a universal rule because different apps and platforms interpret vertical font metrics in different ways.
Line gap: some designers use it to add extra spacing between lines, while others set line gap to zero and instead control the line spacing by adjusting ascender and descender values, because it can behave more consistently in many environments.
Ascender values: some set ascender to match the intended typographic ascender height, while others set it high enough to include the tallest glyph or accent in the font to avoid clipping in certain applications.
Font family, it’s often best that all styles share the same vertical metrics so lines don’t change spacing when you switch between regular, bold, italic, etc. This usually means choosing values that work for the “worst case” style and applying them across the family.
