I'm sorry to neglect your very welcome response for so long a time! I am relieved to know this is considered important, and hope the wonders of OpenType will soon be generously accessible!! While it may seem like a moot point when the opening region in an OpenType font works as the ascii set (so to speak) as if it were in one the legacy formats, there is a greater concern than the more obvious one of making the other ranges, and their glyphs, useable in Finale. Because OpenType has been the standard now for nearly 20 years, it is good housekeeping for a program of Finale's importance and sophistication to embrace it. There are already many barriers to using Type1 fonts, along with other legacy formats, and the workload for upgrading digital asset backlogs for those of us who are active in the publishing world grows every day we are not able to use formats that are the accepted standard. I can not urge you on enough in bringing this functionality to Finale!!

I have no interest in migrating to Sibelius, as I am convinced Finale is the superior app, and content to continue using it. But, for the moment, I am still using Finale2006 for important jobs....

Hi Christopher:

I'm sorry to neglect your additional feedback. I completely agree with you and appreciate your support of Finale and feedback to improve the experience.

Cheers,

Michael Johnson

No problem: I assumed you were being the Mad Scientist in your laboratory, working to make my typographic dreams accessible to waking reality. I await with bated breath!!

I'm happy to see Finale 26 is now available, but I'm not finding any mention of OpenType compliance: has the issue raised here been addressed in this new version?

I want to return to this request because the need is still profound. Aside from the ubiquitous frustrations in practical use, the extraordinarily antiquated nature of Finale's typographic controls are an embarrassing design flaw for an app that is so marvelously developed otherwise. Is there any hope that, sometime very very very very soon, we might have an array of opentype controls to choose from like those shown in the pic attached to my original post??

Just my opinion, but I sincerely doubt it. Michael Johnson is no longer with the company, and I fear that much of his encouragement for new and improved features is gone with him.

I am deeply saddened to know that Mr. Johnson has left the company; I am also disappointed that no one from the company has bothered to comment here.

I too am looking for more advanced typographical controls.  Adjacent to this is the lack of tighter font size control such as decimal (e.g. 9.5, 10.25, etc).  I use Adobe InDesign to get around some of the issues but it would be terrific to be able to set it up in Finale.  When working with lyrics, one may want the staff size to be at say 88%, but the font needs to be 9.5 or 9.75 (because 10 is a little too large).  So, you end up taking up a mediocre way out:  page size is set to 87/88% and the relative font size is 9.5 or there about.  It's an inexact science.  When working with printer/binders (for hymnals, etc.) you have to now build in a "fudge factor".  The normal "fudge factor" alone is about 1% after taking into account bleeds and gutter measurements.   So now my fudge factor is +/- 2.5% with fingers cross and a kiss to the wind.  Please MakeMusic, put a kind effort for us who are in need of it.  Thank you.

I am encouraged by Chris Cianflone to reinvigorate this request, which he has renewed himself within the company. I am very happy to see the advent of OpenType compliance with the new accessibility of the ranges containing music glyphs that are now stabilized by the SMuFL initiative: it is a giant step forward for the app! My eagerest hope is that there will be, at last, a concerted effort to avail the other OpenType resources throughout Finale, bringing typographic controls out of the late 20th Century and into the 21st. Ideally, this would mean a menu like that found in InDesign, which I attach in a more explanatory image than the one I posted 4 years ago. Just as it was 4 years ago, so it is now: it would be a dream, long-dreamt, come true if Finale offered controls like these.

It’s good to have a dream, but I doubt we will ever see something like that in Finale. Nor, honestly, do I see a need. Why should Finale offer something that InDesign already does? Does InDesign support music notation?

Mike, I think you may have missed the point for this request.  When working with choral literature and more importantly hymns, one sets the musical notation so a raster 5 size, but the compromise has to be the lyrics.  9 is too small, 10 might not fit too well, but 9.5 or 9.75 pt. would be perfect.  Or maybe 10 is too small, but 11 is too big, and 10.75pt fits perfectly.

So, in my engraving of hymns it has become a real pain or nuisance to figure out what one has to do to reduce the page to make everything fit correctly.  You have to play with the page reduction, then decided if the lyric font is fixed or not fixed, and if it is not fixed, now you have to play with baseline for each stanzas.  That's a lot of work, when the easiest answer is to give the capability to size the font down to the fraction as InDesign, does.  

It should be noted that Dorico does this quite well.  I've been playing with Dorico and just haven't had the time to figure out the technique to export the page without margins as a PDF for inclusion into an InDesing/Quark, publishing.  If I could figure that out, I'd probably hang up Finale, but I've drank the cool-aid way too long.

Well, taking what seems to be your primary request for decimal point sizes, that has been requested for years. And never realized.

Mr. Rosen, anyone who cares about how their scores look will be interested in the great resources OpenType has to offer. Perhaps you didn't read the top of the thread? I don't understand the point of your remarks about InDesign in relation to Finale, except that they are an attempt at ridicule: I'd hardly try to set music in InDesign any more than I would try to set text in Finale. It can not be denied that OpenType is the standard format for digital typography, and has been for two decades. Some might point to SMuFl as the only initiative that dealt specifically with OpenType standards that directly impact the functioning of Finale. I disagree: alphanumeric glyphs also play an integral role in any musical text, and the varied resources beyond the ASCII base of glyph positions are vitally important to professional editors of music. Many fonts issued in OpenType format offer glyphs from other character systems, such as Cyrillic, which are not accessible in Finale. For an app that offers so very much flexibility, the absence of OpenType accessibility in Finale is a tremendous constraint for users who rely on the app in their professional publishing careers.

OK. Keep asking for it. I’ll shut up.

Bump: Is there any progress toward generalized OpenType compliance in Finale? This has become more important now that Type1 fonts will no longer be supported after January 2023.

Since your agenda is fractional font sizes, SMuFL is your most likely source for information.

MusicXML 4.0 appears to support decimal sizes.

https://www.w3.org/2021/06/musicxml40/musicxml-reference/data-types/font-size/ 

There are discussion and info pages at SMuFL.org that may point you in the right direction.

https://www.smufl.org/fonts/ 

In the opening comment of this thread -- alas, posted 5 long years ago -- I was talking about the accessibility of advanced typographical features in text fields, measure numbering, etc. -- basically everything aside from the music glyphs. I'm especially keen to see features like ONUM, SMCP, AALT, SUBS, SUPS, NUMR, DNOM, (those last 4 for figured bass) enabled. There are more, but those are the ones that occur as I write.

I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting this kind of functionality. While I understand the need for Finale to interface with other apps that generate sound, the original mission of Finale was to make it possible to lay out the western music symbol system, and type lies right at the foundation of that aim. That we have typographic controls that are state-of-the-art for 1992 is flabbergasting as we now move into the third decade of OpenType's status as the standard format. I plead this case until blue in the face for decades now, all to no avail -- at least, so far. Is anyone with Stars Upon Thars at MakeMusic reading this I hope? Bring us into the 21st Century: the water's fine!!