Opus font: Sibelius 7 Acorn Rise OS versions

[tomsmatejames]

Hi everyone, first post here!

For those interested in music font design: I’ve got a copy of the Sibelius manual from the ’90s, written by Ben and Jonathan Finn when it was the new kid on the notation software block. Aside from being a generally great read, I was interested to see that the musical examples were typeset using an Opus font that looks quite different to the font that modern-day Sibelius uses. I’ve attached a few scans of short extracts, where you can see a much more upright and rounded treble clef, as well as different flat accidentals and significantly straighter quaver flags:

Sib. manual extract 1.png (4.57 MiB) Viewed 964 times

Extract 2 shows slightly different dynamic markings, particularly for mezzo:

Sib. manual extract 2.png (5.03 MiB) Viewed 964 times

Extract 3 has a fuller brace that curves away at the ends from the staves, rather than clamping on as modern day Opus does:

Sib. manual extract 3.png (3.67 MiB) Viewed 964 times

You can also see these glyphs in many of the pieces published in the ’90s by Faber on the score previews on their website.

However, there are also extracts set in a font that looks a lot closer to the current-day Opus, which can be seen in Extract 4:

Sib. manual extract 4.png (6.34 MiB) Viewed 964 times

The font listed in my edition of the manual (edition 3.5, published in 1997) is stated as being OpusIV, which suggests that the Opus font went through several revisions in the first few years following Sibelius’ public release. I’ve re-typeset Extract 4 using the current version of Sibelius Ultimate which highlights that there are still some notable differences in the glyphs, mainly that the quaver flags are much more fluid in OpusIV and don’t have that crook in the tail that current-day Opus does.

Sib. manual Trumpet extract 4 (Sibelius Ultimate).png (23.28 KiB) Viewed 964 times

The treble clef can be made to look almost exactly the same if you rotate it a bit, I wonder why?

I don’t know what everyone else thinks, but the versions of the Opus font used on the Rise OS look much nicer to me than the version of Opus used today that was introduced when Sibelius made the jump to Windows and Mac. I was wondering if anyone on the forum had experience of working with Sibelius back on Acorn computers or knew about the reasons for the changes made to the Opus font over the years? I’d be interested to know.

There are also two others fonts mentioned in the manual, Rameau (described as having a traditional ‘plate-engraved look’) and Manuscript (a font mimicking handwriting, possibly in the same way many of the current ‘jazz’ fonts do), but there aren’t any pictures on them in the manual and I can’t find mention of them at all online — anyone know anything about these?

[OCTO]

This font looks much better, similar to Ross. Interesting!

Today's Opus is, in my opinion, a disaster in almost every aspect. If I could, I would ban scores using Opus.

[jrethorst]

The treble clef in today's Opus is grotesque. That would have been part of my (pre-Dorico) decision not to use Sibelius, except that the program had a switch to use the original Adobe Sonata font, with its own glyph mapping.

[Harpsichordmaker]

It’s perfectly possible to change one or more single glyphs in Sibelius, and of course it’s easy to select an entire different font.
I used to change the parenthesized accidentals to bracketed accidentals (for critical editions). I used to change the clefs as well.