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AMNS / Nightingale

Nightingale music notation software.
Mozilla Public License 2.0
11 stars 3 forks source link

Clarify status of Sonata & other music fonts #54

Open donbyrd opened 8 years ago

donbyrd commented 8 years ago

Inasmuch as we have no rights to the PostScript (as opposed to "screen", i.e., bitmap) version of the Adobe Sonata font, it shouldn't be the default and only required font! -- Briard should be. Unfortunately, several places in the code assume Sonata is available, so this isn't that easy to change: see Issue #79.

donbyrd commented 8 years ago

To clarify the issue, we're talking only about the "regular" music font; for chord frames, Ngale assumes Seville. Ngale currently supports three regular music fonts: Sonata, Briard, and BlueNotz. Briard looks very much like Sonata; BlueNotz doesn't -- it's a jazz/pop style, copyist-style font, so it's not appropriate as Ngale's default. It was pretty easy to add support for Briard and BlueNotz when that was done some years ago because they're Sonata compatible. But there are almost certainly other Sonata compatible fonts! http://www.sibeliusblog.com/tips/changing-music-font-existing-score/ suggests that Petrucci (Finale's original font), Maestro, and Opus are all Sonata compatible. Also, the legal (intellectual property rights) status of many of these fonts isn't clear! Petrucci is free; Sonata isn't. But… Cf. http://musicfonts.net/notation/ ; http://avid.force.com/pkb/articles/en_US/faq/en360569 also has some interesting stuff.

chirgwin commented 8 years ago

@donbyrd Bravura is worth considering:

The Bravura font family is made available under the SIL Open Font License, which means that the fonts are free to download, use, embed, redistribute with other software (including commercial software) or to create derivative versions.

donbyrd commented 8 years ago

Yes, it'd be worth considering, except for one thing: It's not Sonata compatible. But that may not be as much of a problem as I've been thinking; as long as each of the Sonata glyphs we care about has a one-glyph equivalent in Bravura, it might just be a matter of using a different encoding with Bravura!