Default font settings

• Oct 6, 2011 - 09:12

I am new at Musescore (a few months) and am still learning. English is my second language and I hope that I state my problem clearly enough.
I want to change the default font awat from Times New Roman. (I think the choice for a default font was mage 25 years ago and nobody questioned it eversince!). On any new piece of music you have to redefine the font. It is so frustrating! If for instance yoy change the lyrics font to Tahoma Musecore will change it back to Times new Roman the moment you hit the spacebar. Why?
Please see if this can be changed!


Comments

In reply to by Hennie van Wyk

from what I've seen in the nightly builds, it looks Like the default has already changed in the next major release - MuseScore will apparently provide the FreeSerif and FreeSans fonts and use those by default. The facilities for changing fonts also become rather nicer, although I don't know if there is a command to globally set all relevant fonts. Hmm, can a plug-in do that? That could be nice project for someone in 1.1...

Until then, though, Times New Roman is really the best choice for a default, as either it or something very much like it has been rhe practically universal choice of the publishing world for quite some time. Given that MuseScore is cross-platform, the default needs to be something that will actually work cross-platform, and Times New Roman is really the only sensible choice for any application that doesn't provide it's own font.

BTW, the process of customizing MuseScore to use the fonts you want is easier if you understand how things work. First, "most" people should fairly seldom be creating new scores from scratch - the templates provided are already customized to choose appropriate defaults for different types types of scores. Although most probably use Times New Roman, for the reason stated above - it's really the only sensible cross-platform choice. The Jazz Lead Sheet template in 1.1 uses the MuseJazz font provided with MuseScore for most text elements, in keeping with the way most jazz publishing is done (with a quasi-handwritten look).

If you wish to create arrangements using fonts that may or may not be present on other people's systems - so you do not intend to upload them to musescore.com or otherwise shae them with others - then all you really would need to is customize the templates. Once you've saved a new version of the template, then all new scores you create from it will have your font settings already loaded.

It's only in the cases where you need to create a score from from scratch that you will need to manually load a saved style. And if you tend to mostly create scores with the same instrumentation, just create a template, and again, your settings will automatically be loaded in all scores you create. Again, only do this is if you know you won't be sharing your scores with others, or if you don't mind limiting your choices to the very few fonts available on all supported platforms.

Even if you tend to create scores for lots of different types of instrumentation and thus think a template wouldn't be useful for you, consider making a template with just a single staff (or no staff, if that works - I haven't tried it) but with your preferred font. Then just create new scores using that instead of creating them from scratch. Hitting "I" immediately after creating the score will bring up the same instrument selection dialog as the new score wizard. I suppose the drawback is that if instruments are added after score creation, you have to add key signature to each staff manually. So you might prefer to use the create from score and then do an explicit style load.

To summarize, the only time you should need to explicitly load a style is if *all* the following are true:

- you don't intend to share scores, or you are OK with limiting yourself to the cross-platform fonts
- you don't tend to create scores for the same instrumentation, so templates don't seem like a viable option
- you create scores for large ensembles (but with different instrumentation) often *and* you use key signatures, so adding instruments after the initial score creation is an unattractive option

The three clicks needed to load a custom style just in those cases shouldn't be *that* big a deal. But I do think it would be quite cool to have a plugin to set all relevant fpnts to anything the user selects, rather than having to having predefined saved styles for each possible font choice.

In reply to by Hennie van Wyk

There is a free XML editor I use called, "xmlcopyeditor.exe" works great. You will have to Google it to fiind the download file. Has both compiler and debugger which is very useful. I write lots of XML code and this editor satisfies all my requirements.

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