Monday, October 20, 2008
Once more about music fonts
There is quite a bit of formal research into the readability of text fonts. For music copying and engraving, it appears that there is quite of bit of hearsay and very little research about readability, much of it fairly hardened into rules about notation style, particularly in commercial music, for example the inkpen-styled fonts preferred by many for jazz or show charts. Is anyone aware of any actual research along these lines that might be useful in improving score design, typography and layout?
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1 comment:
Fonts again. ;-)
I don't know of any research on music fonts, but there was a fascinating article in the NY Times on improving the fonts on the road signs along the interstate. Some of the principles could be applied to music - i.e. the open space inside a letter, legibility in different situations, especially low light, which is not an infrequent problem onstage. It's a very long article, but the whole process they went through is very interesting.
My html tag wasn't accepted - I'll email it to you.
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