Use of any SMuFL font

• May 4, 2016 - 06:54

Is there any plan to allow usage of SMuFL-compatible fonts in the future?


Comments

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

Being involved in the music publishing industry, how do you motivate publishers to use MuseScore that cultivate their own house style and fonts, when they face those limits?
Wouldn't be a great achievement of MuseScore being available to the broadest possible use?
Wouldn't be wonderful for publishers to use any font which would facilitate inclusion of custom symbols provided by their contemporary composers?
Finally, I know that MuseScore is dependent of developer's free time, free will, donations, memberships (..well..!), etc; but wouldn't MuseScore generate an important income by serving the music industry which could invest in tools and extensions which they would need?

My questions are not dialectic, but real, arose from curiosity.

I am a big supporter of FLOSS, and personally use Debian (but not in a daily use). I understand your need to keep MuseScore free and open-source. However, I see some kind of discrepancy:
A) The usage of non-free fonts have nothing to do with freedom, since MuseScore can create or open documents which are in the domain of intellectual property.
B) Calling for free-software, but having musescore.com online with numerous examples of copyright infringements is not the way one should act in this matter.

We are evaluating with a great curiosity MuseScore for our publishing business and use of the closed house-style is of the highest priority. Perhaps, creating a custom font that would be named Emmentaler and swapped with the real Emmentaler could solve the problem?

In reply to by edizioneo

The current code simply doesn't allow for external fonts. One thing to be able to use them would be to have a proper fallback to an I herbal one, should the external one not be available on the target system, which would be good for other reasons too (not all fonts contain all glyphs, only Bravura, being the reference implementations SMuFL is sort of guaranteed to be complete).
Copyright violations on MuseScore.com are an entirely different issue, and reporting mechanism for that is in place, but allowing it to display and distribute commercial fonts by default is not going to happen (I think and hope), so embedding these external fonts in the score is not an option. And having to distribute the font along with the much file is not really user friendly, and without a fallback mechanisms just not feasible.

But then again, MuseScore is OpenSoure, just fork it and add or replace fonts to your heart's content. Check e.g. https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/1740 what it takes to add a font.

In reply to by edizioneo

more precicely: there's a line of code added that causes MuseScore not to crash when it encounters a score with an unknown font, but then usees Bravura instead.

So if you fork MuseScore, add some commercial font to it and create scores with that, you can now also share the score and it won't crash on the 'normal' MuseScore (which does not have that font), but also not show your special font. To share a score with your special font, you'd still need to use PDF

In reply to by edizioneo

how do you motivate publishers to use MuseScore that cultivate their own house style and fonts, when they face those limits?
There are no limits here. As Jojo mentioned, MuseScore is free software. If you want to fork it and use whatever font you want, feel free. Supporting any external SMuFL font is another ball game. As explained in the post I linked earlier, I believe it's far more important for MuseScore to be easy to use and to flourish as an easy to share format than catering for (contemporary music) publishing house specific needs.

Wouldn't be wonderful for publishers to use any font which would facilitate inclusion of custom symbols provided by their contemporary composers?
Any SVG symbol can be used already. It's currently not possible to give them semantics.

wouldn't MuseScore generate an important income by serving the music industry which could invest in tools and extensions which they would need
Which tools and extensions are you talking about? I can't see anything that would generate any significant income.

A) It's not about the usage... It's about the distribution. MuseScore cannot distribute non free fonts, Debian for example would not allow that.
B) This is completely irrelevant with the discussion. No one is supposed to infringe copyrights. If you believe your rights are infriged by any work on musescore.com feel free to report it https://musescore.com/legal/dmca

In reply to by [DELETED] 5

There are no limits here.

I see the font limitation as a very serious limitation, but I understand your point as well. However if you feel that my post is offensive, it is not correct. In a good faith I honestly want to suggest some changes.
It is clear for me that the font limitation is to secure a safe interchange of documents, and also, I believe, the inner structure of the software. My suggestion is to allow a superuser (or advanced user) to change this settings at his/her risks.

MuseScore cannot distribute non free fonts, Debian for example would not allow that.

Not only that MuseScore cannot distribute non-free fonts, it cannot distribute any else font except what is provided within. Here is my point.
There are other free fonts that could be used. I have not mentioned non-free fonts. I have mentioned any SMuFL font. On Debian you can however install any font. Also, you can create your own and install it in Debian.

I can't see anything that would generate any significant income.

I can. For instance giving them a quality and quick direct support, to create plug-ins for their needs, to create fonts and symbols for their use (you can release it open-source), to extend the software's capabilities by developing a certain aspects of the global code, and so on. Hope it helps you for ideas!

No one is supposed to infringe copyrights. If you believe your rights are infriged by any work on musescore.com feel free to report it

Being involved in publishing industry, with a very clear knowledge about the copyright issues, I would suggest, honestly, to reevaluate the way of posting at musescore.com The report ability doesn't diminish the copyright infringement. A copyright infringement is done regardlessly if there is report or there is no report, and definitely it is done when music score is distributed without permission by the original owner on the Internet. It would be VERY BAD if a publisher begins legal steps via court to prosecute the infringement; here your report ability will not help. It could turn out very badly, not only for the MuseScore community but also for developers' jobs, and so on.

In reply to by edizioneo

@edizioneo On the last topic only. MuseScore operates as a service provider and can not be held liable for content uploaded by its users. For the complete legalese, see https://musescore.com/legal/terms That said, MuseScore encourages everyone to file a take down notice when they feel their rights are being infringed. To learn how to file a take down notice, see https://musescore.com/legal/dmca. MuseScore is in continuous contact with publishers to protect their rights. If you have further questions, don't hesitate to reach out to me personally.

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

If we take a SMuFL font, is there any glyph map that shows which symbols (map-codes) are used in MuseScore? Bravura, as an example, has enormous number of similar symbols (such as #). It would be very helpful to know exact which symbol is used in MuseScore. Possible?

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

I think I haven't been clear with my question.
If I want to create a new font, brand new font from scratch, is there any glyph map that MuseScore uses for determining what symbols are used for what object in the score?

For instance:
G-clef = U+E050
Double flat = U+E264

So, I am not interested in how MuseScore swaps the fonts, but how it determinate each glyph. Is there any official mapping like this above?

In reply to by edizioneo

But in the case one wants to CREATE a brand new font, in accordance with MuseScore, is there any current official mapping of symbols?

Well, this current official mapping is called SMuFL. That's the whole point of this discussion no?
If you want to know which symbols MuseScore uses by default in the palette (except the Symbols one which contains every single symbol defined by SMuFL). You can easily grep the code to find out. Here is a list extracted from today master: https://gist.github.com/lasconic/1a642794ecc2c9969bd7630a98b24e57 These are symbol names as defined in SMuFL glyphnames.json.

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