Support for Google Fonts

• Oct 14, 2019 - 00:32

Include support for Google Fonts as text font option.

https://fonts.google.com/

Like Bravura, Google Fonts are available under SIL Open Font License.

Support for Google Fonts would significantly and immediately improve the options for user text font selection, it would create a definitive and limited set that would be compatible with publishing scores to Musescore.com with consistent text font rendering.

Might be worth exploring enabling a font manager (similar to how Adobe manages fonts) that would only install the necessary fonts required for a specific score when needed, or to enable download/installation of new fonts via the Resource Manager.


Comments

Those are supported on musescore.com already. Only issue is that when shareing scores with others that don't have those fonts installed that there MuseScore gallsmack to some other installed font.

To prevent that from happening MuseScore would need to embed all those fonts into the program (probably causing it to gat a lot bigger and a maintainance nightmare), or the fonts used in a score into that score, increasing the score sizes by quite a bit.
Or, indeed, a 3rd option: when detecting such a font allowing to download it, like via resource manager, question is whether this should one-by-one (as needed) or all-at-once?

It would help quite a bit already, if MuseScore instead of silently falling back to e.g. "MS Shell Dlg 2" it would bring up a dialog, "This scores uses font XYZ, which is not available on this computer, so it gets rendered using "MS Shell Dlg 2". The missing font can get obtained at abc" or some such?

In reply to by Jojo-Schmitz

How I imagine this is that the behavior of fonts would be different from current. You would have two setting in preferences:
- Use Local Fonts (<< exactly the same as current)
- Use Musescore Cloud Fonts

The idea of Musescore Cloud Fonts would be that it would be a collection of fonts that are stored on the server and can be installed as needed.

This eliminates the need to have more than a couple of fonts in the default installation, keeping it small, but greatly expanding user customization.

The delivery and installation behavior could utilize the Resource Manager.

When user opens an existing document, should automatically check for installed fonts:
a) If font is not installed, find font in Musescore Cloud Fonts directory
b) If font is found in Musescore Cloud Fonts make available in Resource manager
c) Download and install font from Resource manager
d) Reload/refresh document to display newly installed font.

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