Notewriter by Opus1

[cyberish]

Who experienced some work with "Notewriter" ? How does it compare to other Score Writing software ?

http://debussy.music.ubc.ca/download.html

[macarone]

I was an original purchaser of the first version, that was released by a company called Passport.
There were a number of updates, and eventually a major upgrade to NoteWriter II.

The manuals were released in 3 ring binders, and  I still have the original printed materials.

This program was unique in that the music page was created as an engraver working on a plate would, with the exception that you didn't have to work in mirror image. You put everything on the page exactly where you wanted it, and it stayed there. NO automatic justification.

A major drawback was that it used ONLY the UGLY Adobe Sonata font.

Text for Vocal music was a bit problematic, but I did discover "workarounds"

This program is one of the reasons I still use OS 9 from time to time.

A sample of a choral piece made with NoteWriter II is attached.

[cyberish]

Cool ... ! I do not find that Adobe Font very ugly 

[macarone]

>Cool ... ! I do not find that Adobe Font very ugly

By their very nature, PostScript fonts cannot look great at all sizes (even with Adobe "hinting":

For eg: if type serifs look great at very small sizes, they will be way too bold at large sizes, and serifs that look great at large sizes tend to disappear at small sizes.

Also, when the PostScript fonts came out, printers were 300 dpi and everything tended to look "bolder". The fonts were designed for these printers. When used with 600 dpi printers, and even more so with image setters, they are not bold enough. That is why reverse printing (white type on black background) is often so hard to read.

In general the Sonata font is simply not bold enough. I won't go into each symbol, but for eg: the Treble Clef is just too squat. Not tall enough. I altered it in the font I use, which should be noticeable if you compare the sample I u/l'ed with another sample using Sonata font. The look is not as bad at fairly large sizes, but at small sizes, that you might use in a pocket score noteheads are not wide enough.

I thought I would try widening them, only to discover that NoteWriter does not use a note with stem, but only the notehead, and the program draws the stem. This is so that the stem only goes as far as the beam it is attached too. If the notehead is widened the stem will not join it at the very edge.

I'm only answering your comment, and realize this will interest very few, and many may not agree.

[IIO]

choose your favorite font, make a copy, rename it (or its contents) to "Sonata", reboot.

[macarone]

> choose your favorite font, make a copy, rename it (or its contents) to "Sonata", reboot.

I strongly suspect that this topic is a big bore to most here, so let me start with a Tip about Fonts that might be useful to someone who arrived here by accident:

In OS 6, Apple Menu Items (then called Desk Accessories and Fonts needed to be in the System File. This was later eliminated, in OS 7, if I remember correctly. There was a utility called Font/DA Mover to do this. Even though unneeded, it continued to work even in OS 9.

And my tip is: if you held down the Option  Key before selecting your source or destination, Applications would become available  in addition to the System File. You could retrieve special fonts from games, for eg, and add them to the System File for use in a word processor. You could also embed a favorite font in an application, that would then be available on any computer it was copied to, even if the second computer did not have it installed.

Now to your suggestion:

NoteWriter's handling of both Sonata and text files was very primitive.

Open a new document in a word processor and type:   =    &   ?    w    h    q    s    r   (with spaces between characters)

and then copy that line and keep pasting it several rows down.  Then highlight one row at a time and change it to a music font:

For eg: Broadway Copyist, Engraver, Inkpen2, Jazz, Maestro, Opus, Petrucci, Reprise, Scriabin, Sonata

Finale and Sibelius may be able to use a number of them, but NoteWriter cannot handle the spacing differences.

I already mentioned that NoteWriter only uses noteheads and the program draws the stems, so trying to make them a bit wider, does not work, because the stem does not wind up at the edge of the note.

The nice thing about Sonata in NoteWriter (especially when reduced to say 60% when printing, is that NOTHING is bold enough, so my solution has been to export the file and "photoshop" it to make it bolder.

I would be delighted to exchange ideas with anybody that is still using NoteWriter privately.

This really is too esoteric for Mac OS 9 Lives!  This would be more suitable for  OS 6 Lives.