SCORE terrible glyphs

[benwiggy]

In a discussion about SCORE on the Dorico forum, some examples of material generated by SCORE were shown, and I was quite surprised how bad the forms were.

Possibly because it was originally written for pen plotters, everything was a line, and it looks like anything round was made by a fan of lines, which don't quite go all the way round, leaving a little 'bite'. The curved edges are actually straight polygons.

Diagonal lines on sharps and accents also seem to have a chunk taken out of the end.

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Probably not the sort of thing you notice at normal viewing sizes -- and yet some of us complain about similarly tiny details on slurs, and prefer the 'warmer' effect of music fonts that round off sharp edges.

It's certainly true that almost imperceptible details can have an effect on the whole page, even if it's perhaps subliminal.

I also note that some of the early fonts based on SCORE output, like Partita and MuseGraph's Vienna, also have these 'notches' in the diagonals (though not in the circles, thankfully), which they have slavishly copied.

[NorFonts]

Ben, this reminds me about those ttf fonts that were used around early 90s, but I also suspect that it might be some old pdf rendition that were set to low resolutions maybe to 150dpi instead of 300dpi? Sometimes it maybe the faulty output of the font program being used...I remember where FL5 with bad user's settings may sometimes outputs the same glitchy glyphs like in your screenshot.

[benwiggy]

Yes, but these aren't fonts! They are drawn.

And the text in the PDFs is perfectly fine vector.

[odod]

I have been noticing this since the day one i saw the pdf output by SCORE. I guess it's because the programming code make the output like that, but it's invisible when you printed out tho. That is why, I had to made my own SCORE alike font,

P.S: this G clef is very hard to reshape. I had to trace everything and ZOOM it 400% in order to get the best result. I know Partita font exist, but I don't have the original font file.

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[OCTO]

I believe you can choose the number of vector nodes in SCORE itself, because not all SCORE made scores look like this.
Also, the laser print jet can "round" the vector graphics and these mistakes actually vanish.

And yes, SCORE doesn't use fonts at all. It uses the vector graphic output which can be adjusted to a certain printer to be used. In that sense, the SCORE's vector graphic scores are superior to one made using fonts.

I know Partita font exist, but I don't have the original font file.

There is also Vienna (Finale) and Wolfgang (Sibelius) that are generated from Partita. Partita is extracted from a SCORE file, I guess.

[benwiggy]

You can see the same 'steps' on the curves and 'bite-marks' in Partita. Georges at MuseGraph spent a lot of time smoothing the curves, as @odod has done, on Vienna.

The clef is very well balanced, but some glyphs, like the C time sig, are not very nice, IMO.

[NorFonts]

It very easy to smooth the angled curves just by doing a screenshot of the whole glyph and paste back into FontLab or FontCreator, do that 2 or 3 times for each glyph... Of course you will need to resize and try some little balance back your new shape. I've used to do that in FC3 in 2002/2003 or so.

[OCTO]

@benwiggy what is the staff size of the example with tie? Looks to me as a very small staff (because of the tie's curves).

[benwiggy]

@benwiggy what is the staff size of the example with tie? Looks to me as a very small staff (because of the tie's curves).

Yes, it's an orchestral score, so fairly small.

[OCTO]

@benwiggy what is the staff size of the example with tie? Looks to me as a very small staff (because of the tie's curves).

Yes, it's an orchestral score, so fairly small.

right, that's why SCORE makes it look so "bad" when zoomed in. SCORE actually rounds vector points to the closest adjusted for a certain printing machine, and therefore it looks so malformed.

As a comparison, Finale has slur's tip of 0 size, but here SCORE "emboldens" size of the reduced elements, so that they appear visible when printed. Finale, Sibelius, Dorico creates an extremely thin lines and curves when staff size is small or very small; I am not sure why nobody has taken this problem in account, particularly Dorico which is the newest software with an active development.
In other words: 50% reduced staff size should not have 50% reduced lines and curves!