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Font Utilities dialog box

How to get there

Choose Document > Data Check > Font Utilities.

What it does

This dialog box tells Finale to inspect the font of every musical element in your piece—articulations, expression marks, chord symbols, the music itself—in search of the font you’ve specified, and replace each occurrence of it with a different font you specify. This is particularly useful if, for example, you decide you want to change the font for all your tempo markings at once, or all your chord symbol suffixes.

This dialog box also includes variety of commands related to font management, including dealing with fonts in files opened cross-platform.

Basic tab:

Search For This Font • Select. Click here to select the font, size and/or style to search for. Finale presents the Font dialog box.
Replace With This Font • Select. Click here to select the font, size and/or style with which to replace the found items. Finale presents the Font dialog box again.
Apply Changes to Fonts in Shapes. This option determines whether Finale will search shapes, as well as text, for font changes when you select any of the data check options relating to fonts. When this option is not selected, Finale only searches text—such as text expressions, lyrics, staff and group names, text blocks—for font changes. Finale does not change the fonts for any font characters embedded in shapes.

Note: When Apply Changes to Fonts in Shapes is selected, any data check operation may take slightly longer, depending on the number of shapes and the fonts used in the shapes.

Scale Font Size to: _%. Enter a value in this text box to change the size of a font throughout the Finale document.
Check Document Fonts Against System Fonts. Choose this menu item to compare the font list in the file opened to the font list of the computer being used.

Advanced tab:

Note: If a font is marked as a non-Symbol Font on the first computer, then opened on a computer where it is marked as a Symbol Font, selecting this option will mark all the text as Symbol Font text, BUT WILL NOT RE-ENCODE THAT TEXT. This is a limitation of cross-platform encoding; it cannot be done reliably more than once. When text is re-encoded upon opening a document, any attempt to undo it (by encoding it for the opposite platform) will not yield reliable results.

Reset Symbol Fonts List to Default. Choose this option to restore the default list of Symbol Fonts in MacSymbolFonts.txt. This command is useful if a font has been added to the list of symbol fonts unintentionally, which was considerably easier to do while opening files cross-platform in versions of Finale older than Finale 2009a.
Sync Document to Symbol Fonts List. If a document is saved on a Mac, where a font such as Times is listed as a Symbol Font, then opened on a Windows computer where Times is NOT listed as a symbol font, this command updates the document to treat Times as a non-Symbol Font. Then, it will re-encode the required text.
Convert Text for Windows. This command tells Finale to convert higher ASCII text font characters (such as è, ö, and hard spaces) to the appropriate font encoding for Windows. Finale does this by default via the Automatically Convert Text In Files From Other Operating Systems option in the Preferences-Open dialog box.