To make a SMuFL-compliant font for use in applications like Dorico, you might think you can just put the symbols in the right places, and the font makes itself. It turns out there’s a lot more to it than that — but it can be done.

To make a SMuFL-compliant font for use in applications like Dorico, you might think you can just put the symbols in the right places, and the font makes itself. It turns out there’s a lot more to it than that — but it can be done.
Intelligent figured bass is one of the new features in Dorico 3.5, and that’s no empty boast. Dorico’s insistence on understanding the meaning of music symbols provides some very powerful capabilities. Let’s dive right in with a real-world task: adding figures to a Bach chorale.
The Norfolk and Pori angled slash chord (ASC) fonts for Sibelius have been updated so that they are as easy as possible to use while adding even more features for power users. The baseline of the ASC fonts will better align with non-slashed chords, Scandinavian and Nashville Number System support is also added, and there are a number of other new features for chords in legacy mode.
Figurato is a specialist font for figured bass notation. It allows for easy input of multiple vertically stacked numbers and accidentals. It can be used in all major commercial desktop notation software, regardless of whether the program supports figured bass notation natively.
Times New Roman is ubiquitous as the default text font in Sibelius, Finale, and many other programs. If you’re looking for a different look but need the same font metrics as TNR so that the position of all of your text will stay the same, try the Tinos font.
Yesterday I shared a handy tutorial by Philip Rothman of NYC Music Services concerning the Inspector in Sibelius 7, and as a follow-up, here’s another excellent video that Philip has put together concerning the improvements in text and typography features in Sibelius 7. In just ten minutes, Philip walks you through many of the improvements […]