Why is the Petaluma Text font the same as the MuseJazz Text font?

• Jan 8, 2023 - 05:49

I personally prefer the Petaluma engraving for lead sheets instead of Leland, but when setting the engraving font in Style/Score, the text font is the same as MuseJazz Text (or at the very least not what the Petaluma text normally looks like - example included below). Is there a way to add the correct Petaluma font manually? Is there a reason the normal Petaluma Text font isn't included, but the engraving font + Petaluma Script is?

Included a screenshot from my score as well as the most common example I found on Google of Petaluma. Everything looks correct except the chord symbols.

Attachment Size
Musescore Petaluma.PNG 90.98 KB
Petaluma Ex..png 55.48 KB

Comments

• Jan 8, 2023 - 23:29

Okay, so setting the chord symbol style to standard, the Petaluma Text font is still just wrong. It should be its own font, but it's identical to the MuseJazz Text (except the sharps and flats are shrunk, for some reason). The result is the same whether you change it through Form > Style > Text Styles > Chord Symbols or the just Properties palette.

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• Jan 10, 2023 - 23:39

To be clear: if you select Jazz style for chord symbol, then MuseJazz is always used regardless of which font you try selecting - MuseJazz is built in to how the Jazz style works. All sorts of custom glyphs are used; it would be impossible to get the same result with another font (except by creating a custom XML file for that as was done for MuseJazz).

In the Standard style, it should honor the selected font for the chord symbol text style (not the "musical text font", which is totally separately). Thius works perfectly for me. But, Petaluma Text is not a text font - it's the text version of the notation font. Petaluma Script is the normal text font that I assume you are thinking of, so that's what you should select - as the chord symbol style.

Having the word "Text" in the name of a font that isn't actually a text font is indeed a bit confusing, but it's how the SMuFL standard is defined. The idea is that these are fonts you can use to incorporate notation into text.

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• Jan 11, 2023 - 14:04

Creating the MSS file to simply use Petaluma for all text is a piece of cake. But recreating all the subtleties of the Jazz appearance for chord symbols would be considerably more work. On the other hand, also a valuable exercise, because if it works for Petaluma, it should work for more or less any font.

The reason MuseJazz works differently is some of its glyphs already have position and size adjustments built in, plus there are special combined glyphs like the small caps "MA" etc. Some of this makes it easier for the chord description file to do what it does, some actually makes it a little harder.

There was work done for a GoC project a couple of years ago to add more customization to the chord symbol style, but it was put off for a later release.

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• Jan 11, 2023 - 14:52

I don't know that it would be that valuable. We still desperately need a simple way to change all text styles to any selected font. ; Petaluma is of course just one of many fonts someone might want to use for text.

I guess one reason Petaluma Script is special is that we do provide it, so something could be better than nothing. Still, an MSS file is hard for people to discover, and it would leave the most important part of the job - fixing the chord symbols - not done. I suppose having the MSS file at least turn off the "Jazz" setting for chord symbols would help, as might setting the chord symbol superscripting style options to at least partially emulate the look Petaluma is derived from. I don't know, maybe it could be interesting, if someone were to volunteer to tackle that.

Who knows, maybe someone would even be willing to try their hand at an actual chord symbol description file optimized for Petaluma...

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