>Anyone have the skinny on available fonts and licensing issues involved in
>distributing those fonts? If there's a plethora, do you have a favorite,
>and why is it your favorite.
>
>I guess more importantly, since I assume most of the fonts are a 'lookup
>assignment table' type system, if possible, we'd like to use a font that
>a) gives a good clean overall screen and print appearance especially when
>a user resizes layout, b) contains tons of symbols to satisfy any musical
>whim, c) is available and somewhat similar in font-metrics across
>platforms { mac, pc, X }
TeX is cross-platform, sort of, and has all the symbols you want. You
can also get its fonts in TrueType and PostScript versions, and I *think*
you can get most of what you want for free, at least if you're prepared
to do some conversion work. Have a rummage round a TeX archive site.
Your problems are (a) TeX has an idiosyncratic scheme for accessing
fonts which no other application can make use of, and (b) the standard
TeX text font, Computer Modern, is an etiolated abortion that nobody
in their right mind would want to use if they weren't stuck with TeX
and which appears to be the result of a conspiracy by headache-pill
manufacturers.
I think it would be better to adopt one font for the symbols (music
encoded in ABC doesn't need a great number of them) and let users
assign other fonts to specific roles in the score themselves (title
font, composer font, text annotation font...). A user who is trying
to embed scores generated by your software into other documents, or
match an existing "house style" for publication, will need the ability
to control these.
If you must make a choice or set a default...
My favourite variable-width serif text font is Palatino. I arrived at
that choice by experiment: my vision is not particularly good, has been
deteriorating for years, and this was during a bad patch. I printed a
pageful of the same text at the same size in every font I could find,
seeing which one was readable from the greatest distance. Palatino
won by a big margin, with Computer Modern far at the bottom by an even
bigger one. Bodoni, Garamond and Caslon would probably rate pretty
well too, I couldn't test them at the time.
I haven't done the same experiment as thoroughly with other kinds of
font, but get the impression Gill Sans would beat any other sans-serif
proportional font at the same test. I generally use Courier for fixed-
width but I'm sure there must be something better out there.
=================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> ===================
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