I am not a professional engraver, though I'd like consistent, professional results, and ideally something that agrees or closely aligns with traditional major music publishers - Alfred, Boosey&Hawkes, Durand, Henle, Schirmer, even Hal Leonard.

I understand there are different "house" styles and maybe even specifications - where do I find them? I would assume also that some people would not like to share their settings becuase of "uniqueness" and don't want everyone copying them, but if you would like to share things you feel provide an accurate look, please do.

In fact, if there are any templates out there, that would be nice.

The many Piano books I have (which are a lot of Alfred and Schirmer scores) tend to deviate from the Finale (2010 and prior) defaults in two primary ways:

1. Lines are generally thinner.

2. Notes are generally "larger" (or "bolder").

Now, I've looked at "Bravura", Dorico's font, and boy, is it bold. It's too bold though - they're going the wrong way IMHO. But it is what it is.

But if you thin out the lines, the notes look bolder by comparison so Maestro almost gets you there.

Years ago, I kind of made my own "house style" with Finale - and this was at one point before you could change the notehead size globally - I was individually clicking ever single notehead in the piece and increasing its size!!!

As I recall, I basically settings were Times New Roman for all fonts, with Tempo/Mood being 14 pt Bold, and expression markings being 12 pt Italic. IIRC if I needed to create something that looked similar to sfz I could do it with 12 pt. Bold Italic.

Can't remember what I did for titles but I generally used TNR at larger font sizes for the Title, subtitle, dedication (each getting smaller respectively) and Composer, date, etc. I think I used 10 point for anything that was a "note" such as the copyright notice, maybe the measure numbers (in Italic) and any "performance notes" and things like that.

It seems most of the defaults tend to agree with those (though I changed out some default fonts).

What about staff lines, bar lines, any need to edit slur shapes? Articulation sizes? Key and time sig fonts?

I do know that every time I do something at the default settings, I feel like the first note of every measuse is too close to the Clef or Time Signature and sometimes the Key Sig in certain forms. So I always increase the "space before music" size.

But what about the spaces between Clef, Key, and Meter?

Finale has come a long way just to 2010 - I used to have to manually place in dynamics on every instance so it's so wonderful that they get placed automatically now - some of which are fine in their default positioning.

But even just starting with a staff line point size, and notehead font, would go a long way to making it look maybe a little more traditional and less "too perfect".

Thoughts? Suggestions? Resources? How to implement those resources in Finale?

TIA