Music font and lines thickness
I downloaded MuseScore 1.0 a few weeks ago and I'm using it a lot for educational purpose (I'm a music teacher). The program is GREAT and I'm fully satisfied with its features (by now, at least...). Anyway I noticed that the font is a bit "chubby" and that many lines are thicker than I like. While the "strong" appearance is precious when displaying pages saved as png on interactive whiteboards (everything is there, right in your face and easily readable even from the pupils at the very bottom of the classroom) the result looks less attractive on printed pages. Would it be a hard task for the developers (many thanks to all of them, of course) to provide the opportunity of changing the thickness of staff-lines, bar-lines, stems, some parts of accidents, and so on? And what about a feature to make it possible using a different font like Sonata, or Petrucci, or who-knows-what? I'm not saying that you should include those fonts in your releases, as this would problably create copyright issues, I'm just suggesting that you could make it possible integrating (or swapping) the embedded font with an "external" one.
P.S. Please forgive my weak English - I'm just an Italian musician trying to do his best with your language.
Comments
The fonts used by MuseScore are shared with Lilypond, so to the extent other fonts are developed for that application, then they could potentially be used in MuseScore too. If you check out the "nightly" builds (experiment work on the road to version 2.0) you'll see one such alternate font is included. Not sure if you'd like it better, but then, I actually find the default font if anything not as "chubby" as I'd like enough for easy readability when printed.
Line thickness, though, is probably separate. Looks like the nightly builds also include some controls there, under Style->Edit Generat Style. In particular, the Measure tab will give you control over staff line thickness. Already in 1.0, the Beams tab gives control control over beam thickness.
Your English, BTW, is great!
Many thanks for your reply, Marc.
The problem with the nightly builds is, indeed, a problem with my slow internet connection (56K). The files are somewhat heavy and would require 1.5+ hours to download. I think I'm going to wait for the next stable release to see what the developers are going to draw out from their hat.
As regards the "chubbiness" of the font, of course it's a matter of taste and, as I stated, it's not a real problem (indeed, it may be regarded as valuable in particular situations, like reading on interactive whiteboards).
You give me good news about line thickness, and I'm sure I'm going to appreciate the possibility to set the related value via a simple dialog. I'll wait for that feature for as long as needed. Once it becomes available, I will make the staff lines thinner than they are now for printing, take that for granted. Until that moment, those lines are ok with me.
Beam thickness? I like thick beams at least as much as I like thin staff lines! :)
By the way, I'm pushing all of my pupils to get and use MuseScore, and those who already got it say they enjoy it a lot. As a teacher, I realized that the software is much more "accessible" than others I have been used to suggesting in the past. The input mechanism based on the use of the computer keyboard is efficient and intuitive and, after a short while, the pupils type fast as hell, almost as they would do with a word processor. I do as well -- in a matter of weeks, I think I'm going to virtually set apart the mouse and perform most of the input via my Mac keyboard.
In reply to Fonts and such by Aldo
Maybe I'm just making wrong guess and if so, please forgive me but are you printing the PNG ? or are you printing directly from MuseScore or saving as PDF and printing ? It can be that printing a PNG gives bad results.
I'm printing regularly via the File->Print menu entry, and everything works as it should. I'm just a "fanatic" of thinner staff lines than the ones currently printed (and visualized on screen) by MuseScore, so I would appreciate a way to set the value of such thickness. That said, I think that MuseScore is and remains a GREAT piece of software as it currently is, and I'm surely going to keep on using it with satisfaction.
As regards the ability of MuseScore to save in png format, I just wrote that I find that feature precious in my job, as it allows preparing in a straightforward way the graphic files I need to show the musical scores on interactive whiteboards. I prepared a template that gives as its output a 1024 by 768 png file; as the whiteboards I have to deal with have that resolution, I can easily prepare the examples I need in MuseScore, output them as png files, load those png files without any need for time consuming editing, and use them in my classes. Preparing the template required a bit of time, but now that I have it in the proper place, whenever I choose File->New I'm prompted with the opportunity to open a new copy of the template in a matter of seconds.
I attach that template here, in case anyone could find it useful. If you want to test it, open the file, write some notes, choose File->Save As and save in png format. You are probably going to get more 1024x768 pages than you need, but the wastebasket will easily come to your rescue! :)