Fonts

With this technique you can change the font for a single element of the music, such as the clefs or the notes themselves. If you want to change all elements of the music to a different font, see To change music fonts below.

1. Choose Document > Document Options > Fonts. The Document Options - Fonts dialog box appears, with buttons and drop-down menus for various elements of the file.

   The Select Font button refers to the font used for the notes, rests, accidentals, and other musical symbols; if you use this button to substitute a music font not included with Finale, you’ll need to make some adjustments to music characters in the Document Options dialog box. Finale makes the necessary adjustments automatically if you specify Maestro, Engraver, Broadway Copyist, Jazz, or Petrucci as your default music font.

2. From the drop-down menu on the left, choose the type of music character you want to change. Accidentals, Alternate Notation, Augmentation Dots, Flags, Chords, Key Signatures or Notes and Rests are all possible options.
3. Click the drop-down menu to choose the specific music character. Click the Set Font button to display the Font dialog box, where you can choose the font name, type, and point size. You’ll see the sample text change in the display. You can choose any combination of style elements: bold, italic, and so on.
4. Click OK to save your settings and return to your document.

If you choose not to use one of Finale’s default fonts, Maestro or Broadway Copyist, you can substitute any other music font.

Noteman says: If you intend to use a third-party music font, you must add it to Finale's list of symbol fontsA Symbol Font, with regards to Finale, is a font that is not re-encoded when a document is opened cross-platform. Maestro is a symbol font. It has exactly one encoding (character #247 always equals the same symbol regardless of platform). Some characters in non-Symbol Fonts (such as Times) are encoded differently on Windows than on Mac (for example, character #247 on Mac may be represented by #233 on Windows). Finale detects files that were last saved across platform and must re-encode all non-symbol fonts. MacSymbolFonts.txt is a list of all Symbol Fonts. Finale refers to MacSymbolFonts.txt while re-encoding to ensure no font listed in MacSymbolFonts.txt is re-encoded.. To do so, see Configuring MacSymbolFonts.txt.

1. Choose Document > Set Default Music Font. The Font dialog box appears.
2. Choose the new font/style and click OK twice.

   Depending on the music font you’ve selected, you may have to fine-tune the positions of individual elements, such as the eighth-note flags; select the element's corresponding category in the Document Options dialog box.

1. To change chords, choose Document > Document Options and select Fonts. The Document Options - Fonts dialog box appears.
2. Choose Chord > Symbol. Click Set Font and choose JazzCord or the desired chord font.
3. Click OK (or press ENTER) twice.
4. Choose the Chord tool . The Chord menu appears.
5. Choose Chord > Change Chord Suffix Fonts.
6. To change the entire library of chord suffixes at once, click the Set Font button in the lower half of the screen. The Font dialog box appears, letting you specify new font, size, and style characteristics for the suffixes.

   For best results, be sure that the Fix Chord Suffix Spacing check box is selected, so that Finale automatically adjusts the individual characters in each chord suffix to compensate for the new font and size.

7. Select a type style, and then click OK. You return to the document, where Finale has changed the font for your chord suffixes.

   Finale does not change any musical symbols within the suffix, such as the in F79.

You can use Finale’s Data Check submenu to change every occurrence of one font and size to another, no matter where they occur — in symbol libraries, in text, in chord symbols, and so on. See also Change Fonts plug-in.

1. Choose Document > Data Check> Font Utilities.
2. Specify the font to be replaced and the font to replace it with, and click OK.

With this technique, you can scale every occurrence of a certain font that’s used in your document to a larger or smaller font size, no matter what size was used in each occurrence. For example, you could tell Finale to scale every occurrence of New York 24-point down to 12-point. In so doing, Finale would also scale New York 36-point down to 18-point, and New York 10-point down to 5-point.

1. Choose Document > Data Check > Font Utilities.
2. Specify the font, style and size you want changed and click OK (or press ENTER).
3. Specify the percentage you want the specified font to be scaled to. If you want text included as part of a shape expression scaled, make sure “Scale Fonts in Shapes” is checked.
4. Click OK.

To use Tamburo, Maestro Perc, or Jazz Perc for your percussion notation, assign it as the notehead font in each staff or as the document’s default notehead font. Then, take advantage of Finale’s built-in percussion libraries or create one of your own, so that notes you enter on a percussion staff automatically assign themselves to appropriate lines or spaces with the correct noteheads.

1. Choose the Staff tool . Double-click the staff. The Staff Attributes dialog box appears.
2. Click the Notehead Font check box if it is not already selected.
3. Click Select and choose the new font.
4. Click OK twice. Your new font is now being used for noteheads while other elements such as flags and clefs are taken from the default music font(s).

Finale stores a font list with each document you create. The list contains the fonts that were available to Finale when the document was created. If you notice that some font names are listed as missing in the font selection boxes of a certain document, it’s because those fonts were present when the document was created (or previously edited) but are no longer installed.

1. Choose Document > Data Check > Font Utilities. The Font Utilities dialog box.
2. Select Check Document Fonts Against System Fonts and click OK.
3. Open a font selection dialog box. Finale has removed the names of the missing fonts.

If, when you open Finale, you see strange symbols on the screen where music notes should be, you can restore your music fonts by following the instructions in this Knowledge Base article.