Maybe screenshot :P

• Jul 12, 2015 - 11:20

Jazzy

Coming soon...

Greetings,
Gootector

Attachment Size
Jazzy_screen.png 18.41 KB

Comments

• Jul 12, 2015 - 16:32

Huh. I was expecting all this time that it was going to be LilyJazz for MuseScore, aka MuseJazz (like the musical text font already included). This is very different. I have to say that, while LilyJazz looks realistically like it was drawn with a marker and at the same time looks serious and professional—
lilyjazz.preview.png
—Jazzy looks both less realistic and less serious. But perhaps that's the intention.

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• Jul 12, 2015 - 16:41

Not sure what you mean. Whether marker, other pen, or pencil seem immaterial to me. It definitely looks very handwritten to me, which to me is the point., It just happens to look like it was handwritten by someone with different handwriting than LilyJazz, but every handwritten font looks different as should be expected.

FWIW, that's one reason I don't tend to like these sorts of fonts myself - too stylized for my tastes, except for chord symbols. But I know there is a lot of demand for this, and what I've seen so far looks great to me overall!

If I had a critique of "Jazzy" specifically based on that small snippet, it would be that the accidentals seem overly wide. I could see there being cases where it is harder than necessary to fit as much music on a single line as you like. On the other hand, my critique of "LilyJazz" is that the accidentals are too *narrow*, and somehow seem quite artificial, plus maybe even a little hard to differentiate. Whereas the most well-known handwritten font for music, the "Jazz" font that has been able for Finale for many years - seem overly "bulbous" to me; too much variation in line thicknesss, like it was written with a broad-tipped fountain pen or something. Looks OK in notation, but I find text very hard to read text. But I'm sure each will have their adherents.

BTW, for best effect, I would imagine people using "Jazz" or most other handwritten fonts would probably set the stems thicker in their style settings. Probably play with other settings such as for barline, ledger lines, etc.

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• Jul 12, 2015 - 16:52

Mostly what gets me is the clefs; it seems to me that there's no way anybody could possible produce those shapes by hand, except with careful, bit-by-bit shading—which is not handwriting. The LilyJazz clefs look like they could be realistically produced with one or two strokes.

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• Jul 12, 2015 - 17:12

I agree with Marc about the accidentals in my font.
LilyJazz is clone of Sibelius jazz fonts for me.
"(...) less realistic and less serious" - I think that less or more realistic is world in computer game... but font? And Why So Serious? Joker used to say :P
If MuseScore users want clone of jazz font from Sibelius - my work is unnecessary.
See http://www.jazzfont.com/ and Jazz Font.

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• Jul 12, 2015 - 21:24

Well, I guess I'm coming from a perspective where I think of a jazzy font as meant to simulate handwritten jazz sheets—it's not only supposed to be a cool style. But, as I said, perhaps that's not the intention.

As to the seriousness thing, it's kind of like the difference between classic dark sunglasses and colorful sparkly ones in star shapes—I come down squarely on the plain dark side, but it's highly subjective as to which is "better." Would you agree that your font is a "fun" font?

However, please be assured that I'm definitely not discouraging your work. That Jazz Font you linked to, after all (though it does seem to look exactly the same as LilyJazz), costs quite a lot of money and can't be used with MuseScore anyway.

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• Jul 12, 2015 - 22:32

I would certainly agree the intent should be to emulate "handwriteen jazz sheets", it's just that, as I said, everyone has different handwriting. To me, "LilyJazz" looks *nothing* like anyone's handwriting I've ever seen. Nor does the original "Jazz" font for Finale. I am not going to claim "Jazzy" looks like anyone's handwriting I know either, but it doesn't look any less believable to me, and in some sense looks *more* handwritten that either "LilyJazz" or "Jazz".

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• Jul 12, 2015 - 22:48

@ZackTheCardshark: Ok, it's your opinion. I respect that, but I disagree with You.
In my opinion glyphs from LilyJazz are very hard to writing in real life, on real paper. They look like Japanese characters painted by using brush or marker.
"(...) classic dark sunglasses and colorful sparkly ones in star shapes" - meaningful comparsion...
https://thecamohut.com/254/158-254.jpg

New Jazzy glyphs

Greetings and thanks for your opinions,
Gootector

Attachment Size
Jazzy.png 21.7 KB

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• Jul 12, 2015 - 23:55

BTW, to be clear - the "Jazz" font linked to here is the original I have been referring to. It has been around for about 20 years by my recollection. It's possible LilyJazz used it as a model, but definitely *not* the other way around.

To me, both the original "Jazz" and its apparent knock-off "LilyJazz" are far too "quirky" to be useful. I have been reading scores produced with "Jazz" for as long as it has been available, and I know I dislike it.

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• Jul 14, 2015 - 23:45

Not really, but I haven't looked, either. The MuseJazz font we use for chord symbols & text is based on the look of the "New Real Book" series of fakebooks and other publications from Sher Music. Those were originally handwritten but in a manner that was much more carefully striving to look like traditionally engraved music with respect to many details, but with a more clearly handwritten look to chord symbols, clefs, etc. I found that a nice goal, and I guess we could do worse than have a music font that is reminiscent of that look. I'm not sure, but I think more recent publications from Sher are done with notation software? The Hal Leonard "Real Book" series took a different approach to the same basic goal: they used notation software to engrave most of the music, but hand-drew the chord symbols and some other elements. Whatever music font they used did a good job, I think.

I can't say any of the handwritten fonts I've seen available for Finale or Sibelius look as good to me as either of these. Well, they look good in their own way, but seem too "quirky" for me to want to use. "Jazz" in particular looks good to me in some ways, but the text really ruins it - lyrics in particular I find hard to read.

In the end, I find I am very happy just using MuseScore with its default Emmentaler font, but MuseJazz for the text. I do sometimes play with "fattening" some of the elements through style options - thicker stems, bigger augmentation dots, etc - to make the notation look a *little* more handwritten.

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• Jul 15, 2015 - 03:20

I definitely see the resemblance to MuseJazz in this: http://www.shermusic.com/new/sample_pages/0961470143-up-jumped-spring.p… But, oddly enough, it still overall looks to me more like this: http://www.jazzfont.com/demopage.htm and the image of LilyJazz I posted above than it does like the Jazzy screenshots. Looking at the original image Gootector posted, the numbers 3 and 4, the note flags, and the natural sign are very different from those in Sigler Jazz and the Sher Real Book example, which are more similar to each other.

Probably the single most software-generated-looking thing to me about Jazzy is the bass clef. (Probably second place would be the time signature numbers.) I mean, the way it mathematically curves, evenly thickens and tapers to a point, is perfectly rounded, and exactly touches the second-from-bottom line of the staff—well, really take a look at it and conclude for yourself whether it looks hand-drawn at all. It's a digitally tweaked version of the Emmentaler clef, correct?

Again, Gootector, I'm not trying to diss it. It definitely has potential, and it's a worthy project to undertake in the first place. But as is, it's really not my thing. We can agree to disagree without hard feelings, I hope.

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• Jul 15, 2015 - 10:11

@tisimst Good to see you around. Big fan of what you did on fonts.openlilylib.org! (The listing of fonts looks down for the moment btw)

I wonder if you know of any script to convert one of these fonts to SMuFL. I mean changing the glyph registration and geometry to be compliant. Or even if someone already converted these fonts to SMuFL?

We did change our version of Feta/Emmentaler, mscore, to be "more SMuFL" for MuseScore 2.0 (mostly for the geometry) and I recently experimented with a reordering of the glyphs to be closer to the standard. https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/2120

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• Jul 15, 2015 - 13:49

Mscore Emmentaler to SMuFL is done already. See https://github.com/musescore/MuseScore/pull/2120 It's not urgent so it will be for 2.1, not for 2.0.2. My question to tisimst was about a (semi) automated way to convert Lilypond fonts to SMuFL.

If you could have Gootville as soon as possible it would be great because we could include it in 2.0.2 that we want to release on the 16th. If not, it will wait for 2.1, there is no release date for the moment.

Jazzy is even lower priority to me but I like the look so far ! Good job.

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• Jul 15, 2015 - 14:34

For Emmentaler, I used a glyphnames.json (which contains more or less the mapping between SMuFL glyphnames and Lilypond codepoints) and the glyphnames.json from SMuFL. And a python script using fontforge module to do the reordering. So reordering could be easy if we can make such a glyphnames.json file.

My main concern is the geometry... SMuFL glyphs are aligned differently to the origin, they are smaller or bigger etc... If we can describe all these changes in a configuration file or algorithmically (for glyphs from U+XXXX to U+YYYY, make twice smaller, align to origin etc...), we could convert any "lilypond font" to "SMuFL font" (and maybe vice versa) in an automatic way. That would be pretty cool :)

I don't know many font experts but you and tisimst. That's why I ask here if you know if something like that exists or if it has any chance to succeed.

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• Jul 15, 2015 - 15:55

@lasconic: Oh, I never really left. I've been daily following the forums from only a short distance away :-)

Yes, I have font conversion scripts that do all that you ask and more. I am in the process of using them for my fonts to make them SMuFL-compliant. I'm also updating them to do more advanced operations (similar to those you described, and then some) to hopefully eliminate the need completely for manual tweaking after running the script. Right now, almost all of the work is done automatically, but I still have to edit a handful of glyphs by hand.

So, if I could make a small request, it would be that everyone have some patience with me. I am planning on making ALL of my fonts SMuFL-compliant :-) I wish I could give you a time-frame, but it's a work-in-progress. When did you say 2.1 would be released? Perhaps I could do the most desired fonts first? Any requests? How about users vote on it? I personally don't care which ones are done first since they'll all be done eventually. And with a "perfected" conversion script, once one is done, the rest will not be far behind.

Oh, and sorry about fonts.openlilylib.org being down. I just tried it and I got through. We were going through some server changes.

@gootector: I wish you could have both LilyPond + SMuFL in the same file, but there is some unavoidable overlap... wait a minute... hmmm... that just got me to thinking. Actually, this may be possible. In either case, I'll take care of converting my fonts over. Whoever wants to do Emmentaler, go ahead, but leave the others to me if you would. Thanks!

P.S. Nice work on Jazzy! It's great to finally see an update. I can't wait to see the whole suite of glyphs you come up with!

@Marc Sabatella: Have you seen the NorFonts by Nor Eddine Bahha? He created a couple that were supposed to be really close to the "Real Book" style. I have original hand-copied copies of the "Real Book" series (vol. 1 - 3 at least) and I've been seriously contemplating making a nice font out of those. We'll see if I can make the time for it. It's a lot of work, but it's fun. Sponsored work is always nice, too :-)

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• Jul 15, 2015 - 16:12

Thanks for the info! Looks like some nice options out there, and it will good to potentially be able to use some of them with MuseScore some day. I still suspect I personally am "over" wanting to use handwritten notation fonts, but I'll surely try out any options that become available and see how I feel!

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• Jul 15, 2015 - 17:57

Thanks for bringing this up (even though it affects me very little). I know I'm not the only one who has asked this, but why do the fonts need to be compiled into the program? What is it that can't be created at run-time?

EDIT: BTW, I have gone through the process of compiling a font into MuseScore, so I understand what is required currently.

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• Jul 15, 2015 - 18:19

As explained in the post linked by Zack, the main reason I don't want music fonts to be external is Portability. To me the final product of MuseScore is the MSCZ file, not a picture or a PDF. I believe this file should be portable and shareable.

If user A creates a score with font A and give it to user B who doesn't have font A but font B is used as a substitute (with or without a warning) then the score will look different. This is somehow acceptable for text font but I can see why it wouldn't be acceptable for scores. Especially in MuseScore, it would change the layout of the whole score if one font is thicker than another and the user doesn't use line breaks for example. It gets worse if you add MuseScore.com and the MuseScore apps into the mix, where it's nearly impossible to have all the fonts available. It's already a problem for Text Fonts and Soundfonts and we don't have a proper solution for the moment. I'm curious how other software will deal with this issue for music fonts.

I don't really have a priority list for more SMuFL fonts. I would just like to include a "consensual" jazz font in a future version of MuseScore because it's somehow lacking. Oh and I prefer OFL fonts :)

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• Jul 15, 2015 - 18:58

I suspect "Jazzy" will prove pretty "big" in the sense that not as much music fits on a single line as Emmentaler or Bravura. So "Reunion" might not work so well without scaling it down. Maybe instead try the lead sheet version: https://musescore.com/marcsabatella/scores/47000

BTW, one thing that occurs to me, in order to incorporate this, we'll want to get text and chord symbols working well with it too. Meaning at least the same basic ASCII + diacritic glyphs found in MuseJazz. Otherwise, I think people would be put off by the mismatch in handwriting styles if they were forces to use MsueJazz for text but Jazzy for notation.

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• Jul 15, 2015 - 20:13

Thanks, that really looks nice! Did you need to reduce scaling or otherwise adjust things to get it to fit?

Thinking about what glyphs are likely to be especially important in jazz, I think heavier tenuto, staccato, sforzato, marcato, and maybe a few others would be nice. I am not sure how the arpeggio is drawn, but assuming it is a series of individual glpyhs, those could be heavier. Also it would be nice to have the ottava symbols, which are used in preference to plain text.

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• Jul 16, 2015 - 10:07

I really like this new Jazzy font.

Only a remark to the shape of half notes:
--> Maybe they could be slightly bigger for a simplyfied differentiation
(if the copy is bad and grey or you have dark light only)

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• Jul 29, 2015 - 22:08

My font is still in development, so be patient, please :P I would like to thank everyone who wrote comments.
Approximate date of release: the end of August (but I think that it will be the middle of August).
At this moment are created:
- clefs
- numbers
- fermats
- articulations
- accidentals
- dots
- segno
- coda
- brackets
- noteflags for eighth note
- noteheads
- rests

Missing - no idea, at this moment :/
- letters for dynamics
- alla breve and common time
- trill
- noteflags and rest for sixteenth note

Thanks and greetings for everyone,
Gootector

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