This randomness is supposedly a property of the new Sibelius font (Helsinki, is it?). Also check out the November font created by Robert Piechaud. The LilyPond website, I believe, also deals with this issue (if ya wanna use a command-line interface or something like it.) Jim
________________________________ From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] on behalf of Mark D Lew Sent: Mon 24-Oct-05 21:07 To: finale@shsu.edu Subject: Re: [Finale] Possible new fonts (jazz chords and articulations) On Oct 24, 2005, at 9:41 AM, Chuck Israels wrote: > The more I think about it, the more it seems to me that my eye > understands that the built in purposeful imperfection of a computer > produced "hand looking" character will be the same every time it is > printed, and there's an intuitive dissonance to that. Seeing the > controlled inconsistency of beautiful hand copying is something else > altogether, and we may not be able to get a machine to produce that > illusion. Then again, we may. I have a brother who is a font designer and a friend who is a font guru at Adobe, so I get to hear more about fonts than any normal person should. One of the new things in the font world is an expanded format for context-dependent fonts. I'm probably not getting all the details right, but basically the idea is that any given character might look different depending on some combination of influencing factors. The immediate application was to adjust characters based on what other characters are next to them, where they fall within a line of text, etc., but the format has been designed very broadly so that the factors can include pretty much anything the font designer is prepared to program in. My friend tells me that there are already working designs making use of random and pseudo-random factors in order to make more convincing faux-handwritten fonts (which direct-mail designers then use to help persuade you to read your junk mail). Some font designers, as an exercise and/or for their own amusement, have discovered some really creative uses of the format which makes a font behave almost like a rudimentary programming language. For example, somebody designed a font in which the question mark is programmed so that it examines the entire text before the question mark and uses a rudimentary faux-AI routine to create a "glyph" for the question mark which is the question mark itself plus additional text provided by the font in an attempt to answer the question. Anyway, the point of this digression is that fonts nowadays are by no means limited to every character always looking the same. There is plenty of room to design a music font that gives a greater illusion of being handwritten, if only someone is sufficiently motivated to do the work to design it. mdl _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
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