Tip #40 - Fonts common to all windows systems

Fonts common to all windows systems - best to stick to these for posted music

It can be fun to use cool looking fonts in your scores, but there's one drawback to doing this: not everyone will have the same font that you used when you created your score, so if someone else opens up your MusEdit score they may not see the same thing you saw when you wrote it.

When you save your score, MusEdit saves a description of the font you used, but it doesn't save the actual font itself (thank goodness, otherwise every MusEdit file would be huge!). When someone else opens your score Windows uses the font description (eg. bold, sans serif, proportionally spaced) to find the closest matching font on the local system. This is a valiant effort, but if your score relies on careful alignment of text (especially lyrics under musical notes) things might get a bit screwed up because the spacing will be a little different with the substituted font.

For this reason, if you plan on posting your scores for other folks to download and view on their own systems it's safest to stick to the standard fonts which are installed on ALL Windows systems:

Arial - (True Type)
Courier New - (True Type)
Times New Roman - (True Type)
MS Serif
MS Sans Serif

(True Type fonts are the best to use because they scale very precisely at any font size)

The weirder the font you use the less likely others are to have it, and perhaps Windows is less likely to achieve even a fairly similar match. Of course if you aren't planning to post your scores for others to use, or if the precise alignment of text isn't too critical (such as in a title, for example) then go ahead and use those cool fonts!

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