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Pavel Frolov Posted Planned
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The main goal of Finale is to produce sheet music of high quality. While front matter section of sheet music publication can be authored in DTP software, there are many cases for professional typography on the pages with sheet music authored in Finale. Examples are the following OpenType features:

  • Small Capitals [smcp] and Small Capitals From Capitals [c2sc] for composer, arranger, text author names;
  • Discretionary Ligatures [dlig] and Stylistic Alternates [salt] for piece titles;
  • Localized Forms [locl] for text expressions in non-English languages;
  • Subscript [subs], Superscript [sups], Fractions [frac], Scientific Inferiors [sinf], Ordinals [ordn], etc. for technical instructions and footnotes.

For some of these features there is (not so convenient) workaround of pasting the glyphs from character map utility, but often the glyphs needed are provided only as part of OpenType glyph substitution features and are not available in character map utilities (and copy-pasting from other application also does not work in the case of glyph substitution).

For more info see OpenType specification.

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MM_MICHAEL JOHNSON

Hi Pavel:

Updating our font technologies is high on our list and something we're actively researching. Thank you for articulating the value OTF fonts would provide to you. Additionally, we're actively researching more robust and unified text support throughout the application. All of this is high on our radar for all the reasons you list.

 

Cheers,
Michael Johnson
VP, Professional Notation
MakeMusic

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J ADRIAN VERKOUTEREN Posted
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Hope your investigations into more capable font handling includes SMuFL in addition to everything else.

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KNUT NERGAARD Edited
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I wholeheartedly support both Pavel and Adrian's comments.

 

May I just add that there are even some more obscure openType features than those mentioned by Pavel which might prove to be invaluable if supported by Finale. I'm thinking specifically of the mark [mark] and mark to mark [mkmk] features, which would make it very easy to build and display fonts for function theory and harmonic analysis in general. These features could potentially also be very useful for inline display of musical symbols in text strings.

There are probably even more OT features which might prove useful in a musical context, so I would encourage you to research this thoroughly.

 

Additionally, I would love to see better support for text formatting, particularly with regard to leading, kerning and tracking.

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MM_MICHAEL JOHNSON Posted
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Duly noted.

 

Cheers,

Michael Johnson

VP, Professional Notation

MakeMusic

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