choosing a font for a music score?

[Nikolas]

Hi, one of those weird threads of mine  :

I will be printing professionally a music score of mine, for a friend and I want to include 1-2 pages of text (not sure how long yet, although it should be written by today! )

My problem lies on... the font. Normal fonts for scores are times new Roman, but in all honesty, if I write the text (something like an introduction) in the first pages of the score with Times New Roman I'll hang myself.

Any ideas, please?

By default, a unique project of art, such as this has a superior monetary value, than any regular multi-copied one. As such it could possibly be compared to the experience one holds in the concert hall, since the concert hall goers are experiencing a social event rather than a replica of any sort, or the passing through an installation, with the necessary requisite to be there in order to experience fully the event, more than that of any recording. It also holds similar values as those to unique pieces of painting art, where only single copies exist and duplication is considered a fraud.

Imagine the full book of around 20 pages, bound in leather (or something like that), colour pages not solid white, but "broken" with a little "yellow" on, page size A4 and text colour/music colour black.

Again thanks.

[Trent R]

I've always liked the Garamond font(any version--Adobe, ITC). Nice and classy, but not overused like Times.



~Trent

[GarageGothic]

Baskerville is nice, and has an antiquated feel which would fit your yellowed pages. But I also second Trent's suggestion of Garamond.

[Ghost]

Garamond really looks nice and distinguished, but not too fancy. Go for it, says I.

Alternatively, Caeldera is nice too- legible but a bit more "angular" than the ones already mentioned... see if you like it!


http://www.getfreefonts.info/free_font.caeldera.html

[Nikolas]

Guys you're a treasure to have!

One additional question (bundled in more than one  ): Where can I get Baskerville? Caeldera is giving me a 500 error. And how do I install the new fonts, on open office, please? (the last question is only there because I've not tried to install any. I would imagine it should be relatively easy).

Thank you people! You're awesome!

[Oliwerko]

Seconded with the 500 error.

Installing fonts is simply opening Control Panel - Fonts and putting them into that folder.

EDIT:

Caeldera here:
http://www.1001fonts.com/fonts/win/ttf/2118/caeldera.zip

[MashPotato]

And just a note that if OpenOffice is already open (hee!) when you put the new font in the Font folder, you'll probably have to restart it :)

Those are some nice fonts, btw :)

[Layabout]

Caeldera would not be a very good choice for reading. It is very stylised and more useful for using as a title font or decoration font.

Most consider Serif font's easiest to read in large volumes of text. Size 8-10 is the most common as it is easiest for our eyes to read in a paragraph.

Baskerville is quite nice. http://fonts.appliedlanguage.com/fonts/BLTBSK.TTF here seems to be a free downloadable version. I had a quick look, all characters you might need to use seem to be included except perhaps the @ symbol.

Unfortunatly, companies like Adobe and other font makers have taken it upon themselves to create digital versions of classic font's and sell them for money. Utter bastards.

If you've got Garamond, I'd use it, since it is much nicer than Times. Just personal opinion though. Seems everyone hates Times, suppose since it's been included with every windows release since ever.

For all those who may be interested in a little fact, most typefaces are very old, with most dating back over 50 years. It is very rare to see a new typeface developed nowadays, since all the good ones have been made!

Did a little lookup, found an elegant looking public domain serif font. http://www.dafont.com/liberation-serif.font

[Anian]

Something classical and with style, yeah go for the Garamond, Baskerville, Bodoni or Palatino or something, of those more popular you really can't miss that much, sometimes the simplest
is the best (avoid those handwritten stuff, it may look nice but reading it is usually a pain and needs more space). Maybe even Georgia, although it's more of a web page font. Definitely
go for serif font and something that is not too stylish and doesn't have only caps letters (imo caeledra and such are only for headlines and signs, not big blocks of text). Oh, and be sure
to try the font out by turning a full page of text into that font and try reading it and print the last 2-3 choices so you see them on page, that's the only sure way. BTW InDesign and
similar don't have the simplicity of Word but you move the text to them later cause they have better rendering and it always looks nicer in pdf than Word.