OCTO wrote: ↑28 Aug 2024, 12:43
For the last question: I don't think that fonts are the main reason of a nice looking score.
hautbois baryton wrote: ↑28 Aug 2024, 16:41
It's not the music font, it's the artistry of the engraver's choices that make a written page beautiful.
Sure enough, but we aren’t talking about what’s needed to get a beautiful page. That is true for text typographers as well, since the great typographers of the past only used one text type and still they would produce beautiful pages. And of course the fantastic copper-engravers of music did a fantastic job, usually better than the average today, all with one type.
So, I know and agree you don’t need any specific music font and can do with only one. But again, we are not talking of this.
Instead, we are talking about the limitation in the font choice set by Musescore, its reasons and its logic. The stated reasons are illogic, or insufficient, as proved by many music engraving softwares both commercial and free and open-code which easily allow for choosing the music font.
If there is any problem preventing Musescore’s customers to choose any fonts, it’s a problem created by Musescore itself, the other softwares do work flawlessly.
As for the “compile yourself”, ah!
First of all, did you ever try and compile an open code software? Errors everytime.
Second, when you find what’s needed to successfully compile (good luck), you still have not achieved anything. You still need to update the code to accept the new font. Again, good luck. There isn’t a single font list in the cose where you just add your new font and voilà: there are many places here and there along the code, with “specific optimizations” (Musescore’s words) for any font. So you will have to do the same if you want it to work. You are going to spend weeks to succeed, if you succeed.
I have looked at the source code of Musescore and found it nearly impossible to find and understand the logic. Not beacuse it is a badly-written code, far from it, but for the mere number of code lines and different files. I am an ex non-professional programmer, I have probably forgotten everything programming, but am not an absolute newcomer.
Third: why should the user do that? It’s a programmer’s task, a musician could well have no specific skill in programming. Or, if they have, they could well not be willing to waste their time they could be better spending by doing their work (composing, engraving, publishing, preparing parts for concerts etc.).
And fourth: start again at every small or big upgrade of the program.
Sorry but I still find the “compile yourself” an offensive arrogant statement on the part of Musescore (not on OCTO part, of course.
Of course I am aware that Musescore is a completely free program and doesn’t need to offer any of the features we usually take for granted in any other software (in fact, even commercial programs don’t need to: the customers will decide whether it is for them or not).