LS Iris, a distinctive handwritten music font, is revived and available

LS Iris has always been a distinctive presence in the SMuFL font landscape — a handwritten music font with calligraphic roots and a warmth that sets it apart from the field. After several years off the market, it’s back at Notation Central, newly overhauled and significantly expanded.

Luís Salgueiro first released LS Iris in 2021, initially through Music Type Foundry. Along with the MTF fonts, LS Iris was available for a time at Notation Central, but when Abraham Lee made the difficult decision to shut down Music Type Foundry in early 2022, LS Iris went with it soon afterwards. The font has been unavailable ever since — until now.

The re-release is in the same spirit as the overhaul we gave to the Music Type Foundry fonts last year: bundling a complementary text font, offering multiple variants, and packaging everything into easy-to-use Mac and Windows installers. LS Iris isn’t officially part of the Music Type Foundry collection, but for all practical purposes it’s developed and maintained to that same standard.

The font

LS Iris is inspired by the quirks of musical handwriting. It features a bold stroke with little modulation; its round terminals and connections simulate the natural pooling of ink on paper, while the absence of straight lines betrays its filiation in calligraphic gesture. The font retains its warmth and distinctiveness even at larger point sizes and in digital applications — a character that made it well worth reviving.

The case for handwritten

The handwritten font category has a somewhat mixed reputation among engravers. Too many fonts in this space end up looking cartoonish — charming at a glance, but not something you’d put in front of a professional performer.

LS Iris is a different kind of proposition. When Luís first shared screenshots of his work-in-progress on the Steinberg forums back in 2017, the reaction was immediate. One early viewer noted it had “outstanding clarity” and admitted they “didn’t think I would like a handwritten font so much.” Another called it “one of the few ‘handwriting’ fonts that looks like a decent calligraphic hand, rather than a Marvel Comic.” (And for what it’s worth: Dan Kreider, who would later lend his expertise to the Music Type Foundry revival, simply wrote: “Ready to buy this. Take my money already.”)

What makes LS Iris work where so many handwritten fonts fall short is the discipline behind its apparent looseness. The strokes follow the natural motion of a calligraphic pen — the irregularity is principled, not random. As Luís reported after road-testing the font with actual musicians: the results were “very satisfactory.”

The examples bear this out. Even set against the density of a Bach keyboard fugue — four interweaving voices, a tangle of sixteenth notes — the noteheads read cleanly, the accidentals register, and the page holds together. There’s no sacrifice of legibility for the sake of personality.

That legibility opens up a wider range of uses than you might expect. Yes, LS Iris would be an obvious choice for jazz lead sheets and informal ensemble parts. But it’s equally at home in contemporary classical music, where a handwritten aesthetic can signal the personal, working character of a score. For composers self-publishing their own work, it may feel truer to the spirit of a manuscript than any engraved font. And for chamber music or piano repertoire where a warmer, more intimate presentation is the goal — the kind of publication that invites you in rather than impresses you from a distance — LS Iris offers something no amount of fine-tuning in a conventional font can replicate.

Four variants

Where the original LS Iris was a single font, the re-release gives you four. Luís’s original designs are preserved in LS Iris Classic, with his characteristic glyphs for time signatures, tuplets, and dynamics intact. Alongside it comes LS Iris Modern, which swaps in Caveat-inspired numerals and text for those elements, and subtly adjusts other details — like the size of open noteheads — for a more unified look across the score. (More on Caveat below.)

Both Classic and Modern come in Fat versions as well, for a total of four SMuFL music fonts.

Caveat

The text font bundled with LS Iris is Caveat, designed by Pablo Impallari. Caveat is a handwriting type family designed for both short annotations and body text usage, and it pairs naturally with LS Iris’s handwritten aesthetic. What makes it particularly well-suited is a built-in shuffler that provides different glyphs for each character as you type, automatically ensuring variety and avoiding repetition — much like Playpen Sans, which is bundled with MTF-Improviso. The effect is an organic, spontaneous feel that reinforces rather than undercuts the improvised quality of the music font.

Caveat ships with five variants, and an additional Caveat Fat is included as well — handy for use in text elements like playing techniques, rehearsal marks, and bar numbers where a bolder feel is desired.

Also included is a MuseScore style sheet that lets MuseScore 4.6 users easily load Caveat as the text font for their score. Unlike Dorico, MuseScore doesn’t automatically update the text font when you change the music font, so the style sheet handles that step for you — changing only the text font and leaving your other page settings undisturbed.

Nor Eddine Bahha’s contributions

As with the recent Music Type Foundry releases, Nor Eddine Bahha — no stranger to the world of music fonts — has expanded the glyph set and created the Modern and Fat variants, along with the corresponding font metadata files for each. Luís’s foundational designs are unchanged; Nordine has built upon them to deliver a significantly more comprehensive font that fills out more of the SMuFL range.

A note on the previous version

The original LS Iris included versions for legacy Finale and Sibelius, in addition to its SMuFL version. The re-release is SMuFL-only — the same approach we’ve taken with the Music Type Foundry fonts. It works in Dorico, MuseScore 4.6, Finale v27 and later (which supports SMuFL), and any other application that supports the standard.

Existing customers of the original version are welcome to continue using it — it’s just no longer supported going forward. And if you’d like to upgrade, you’re more than welcome to take advantage of the introductory sale price below.

Price and availability

To celebrate the re-release, LS Iris is available at Notation Central at an introductory price of $59.99 through June 25, 2026 — a savings of $20 off the regular price of $79.99. No code is needed.

One thing worth noting: LS Iris is not part of the Music Type Foundry collection, and so it isn’t included in the ongoing MTF bundle discount available when purchasing two or more MTF fonts together. The introductory sale is the discount, and it’s a good one.

Given what’s in the box — four music font variants, the Caveat text font family with five weights plus a Fat version, font metadata files, MuseScore style sheet, and Mac and Windows installers — it’s a compelling package for anyone looking to bring a handwritten character to their scores.

LS Iris is available now at Notation Central.