Good music engravers are always on the lookout for inventive and elegant solutions to make their work easier. To me, one of the more interesting niche areas of typeset music notation are graphical fingering diagrams for musical instruments.
Fonts are the optimal solution for creating fingering diagrams in Finale or Sibelius. Since font characters are essentially vector graphics (as opposed to bitmapped graphics), they will look great when printed at any size, and remain clear and legible on screen.
There are several shareware and freeware fingering diagram fonts currently available for both woodwind and brass instruments from enterprising font designers. I covered a few of these in a previous post.
Legni, by fontographer Richard Bobo, is a family of TrueType fonts allowing the quick, intuitive and flexible creation of fingering diagrams for woodwind instruments. The Legni family consists of the following fonts:
- Legni FluteV (Boehm-system flute & piccolo, vertical layout)
- Legni FluteH (Boehm-system flute & piccolo, horizontal layout)
- Legni Oboe (conservatoire-system oboe)
- Legni OboeEngHn (conservatoire-system English horn)
- Legni Clarinet (Boehm-system clarinets)
- Legni ClarinetBass (Boehm-system low clarinets)
- Legni Bassoon (Heckel-system bassoon)
- Legni BassoonCbsn (Heckel-system contrabassoon)
- Legni Saxophone (all sizes of saxophone)
Richard also has several other fingering diagram fonts in development.
Visit the Legni font website for more information.
Richard is offering all of the fonts on his website for a small suggested donation (e.g. shareware), and (as of this writing) you can download any or all of these fonts free of charge to try them out.
If you require woodwind fingering diagrams for your music notation project(s), these elegant and well-designed fonts are well worth the price of admission. You can download the fingering diagram for one instrument, or for the complete woodwind family.
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