On style guides

[Schonbergian]

What do you, as engravers, look for in publisher-specific style guides? What do you find helpful and unhelpful? Is there anything not included in the most common style guides which you would like to see or which could be extremely helpful?

[Fred G. Unn]

How comprehensive of a style guide are you looking to discuss? I mean, "Behind Bars" started as the Faber style guide and it's 676 pgs long. The Boosey guide is 146 pgs, Schirmer 103, and UE only 23. I've created many brief style guides for co-workers on different jobs that are simply a few screencaps to illustrate things that aren't necessarily clear in the template for that job, so style guides can vary quite a bit.

Are you looking to discuss a comprehensive style guide from scratch or a simple guide to accompany a template?

[Fred G. Unn]

Does anyone feel like getting this thread going again? I didn't mean for my comment to sort of shut things down, I was just pointing out the wide variation in the comprehensiveness of style guides. I have quite a few of them and have created quite a few for co-workers on various jobs so I'd also be curious as to what others think about style guides.

[Schonbergian]

Let's say someone was totally unaware of the style I use to publish my personal things, and I wanted to ensure that they came as close as possible. What would you need in order to replicate my style, or one of any of the members here, without being aware of their personal style otherwise?

[Fred G. Unn]

Would you be providing a template file, or is this recreating your style from scratch? IME the most common situation I encounter is when I've had to hire a team to extract parts or help with editing, so I provide the files with my settings already applied, and then screenshots and examples of parts with different items highlighted or annotated. The most common things I find where co-workers will vary from the style is with Rehearsal # positioning, Tempi positioning, density of layout, vertical positioning of systems, page turns (I have a V.S. set up in the template), multimeasure rest horizontal spacing (I use Jari's plug-in for Finale work), alignment of hairpins and dynamics (ALT-* using TGTools), slurs across system breaks, order of instructions for string writing (I just use Behind Bars pg 426), etc.

For a style guide from scratch without any files, screen shots of the various settings used in whatever notation program would be helpful, including width of all lines, spacing rules, beaming settings, page layout settings, etc. Certainly fonts and positioning settings of all text elements would be necessary. If there were any particular style issues that deviated from common practice definitely point those out. I worked for a publisher once that required a "1" above all single bar rests, for example.

Is that sort of what you were asking for?

[Schonbergian]

Yeah, that helps.

What is the best way to ensure consistency across programs that I am not personally familiar with? There are fonts that can work across programs, but if (for instance) I wanted a copying team to be able to duplicate my LilyPond style within MuseScore and Finale, how would I work out the details?

[OCTO]

"Behind Bars" started as the Faber style guide and it's 676 pgs long. The Boosey guide is 146 pgs, Schirmer 103, and UE only 23.

Sorry for jumping in between, but Fred - do you have these guides that we can obtain somehow?

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What is the best way to ensure consistency across programs that I am not personally familiar with? There are fonts that can work across programs, but if (for instance) I wanted a copying team to be able to duplicate my LilyPond style within MuseScore and Finale, how would I work out the details?

I have never done that but my guessing is that you use the staff space size to define everything else.
The space size measurement is fixed across various music applications.
In my opinion the most important are the lines-settings and spacing-settings. All that you can define in the staff-space size (perhaps the beam angle is not defined by StSp but by the angle itself...?).


p.s. how many dogs do you see on this page?

[Fred G. Unn]

Sorry for jumping in between, but Fred - do you have these guides that we can obtain somehow?

The Schirmer guide is available for sale:
https://classicalondemand.com/manual-of-style.html

The Boosey guide is only for in house distribution, but ... there are copies floating around. OCTO, you posted the UE guide here:
viewtopic.php?f=2&t=188

Actually, that may be a good guide for you Schonbergian, as it shows their style across several different notation programs.

p.s. how many dogs do you see on this page?

LOL! My pic is actually of President Obama's dogs at the White House. I performed there as part of a "Smithsonian Salutes ..." presentation in 2016. When entering one morning, I was one of the last guys in the band through security and the Presidential dog walker was just bringing Bo & Sunny out for a walk. I asked if it was ok to take an iPhone pic, and there it is.

[b3simes]

Any form to share the Boosey style guide?...

[OCTO]

Yes, there is one. But not available on-line.

If Boosey allows, we can publish it here.