You got Finale in my Dorico

With Finale 27 this week, MakeMusic has created new versions of all their music fonts that work with Dorico and MuseScore (sadly, not Sibelius), thanks to the beautify of the Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) standard created by Daniel Spreadbury. They’ve also released those fonts under an open license. One cool feature of SMuFL is that a font can recommend (by way of an extra metadata file) other engraving defaults, such as staff line thickness, that work well with the symbols in the font. Finale included this metadata with their fonts, but they didn’t actually implement the engraving defaults in Finale. Here’s the cool thing about technology standards, though: with no extra work at all from Steinberg, these fonts and engraving defaults work great in Dorico.

Just to play around with this, here’s a side-by-side comparison of Bravura and Finale Maestro.

Bravura (left) and Finale Maestro (right)

You should read more about Finale 27 over at Scoring Notes, and listen to our recent podcast episodes all about it. I’m optimistic that Finale will implement the rest of the font defaults in a future update, because Bravura looks really silly with the dainty staff lines that work so nicely with Maestro.