musescore / musescore/MuseScore
Suggest and download fonts in MuseScore Studio to avoid display issues with Musescore.com
@bkunda is already working on this.
Since Apr 11, 2025.
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Description
Your idea
- Create a way for MuseScore Studio to download (and maybe install) free fonts that can be used in scores on Musescore.com, such as the fonts from the Noto project.
- Display a pop-up suggesting fonts to download and use, if a user is about to upload a score that contains text that will be displayed differently on Musescore.com due to the choice of fonts. (If the user already has installed appropriate fonts, the pop-up should instead tell the user to use the already installed fonts.)
- Display a pop-up to download fonts, if a user opens a score that contains a downloadable font but it has not been installed yet.
Problem to be solved
I found out today that Musescore.com has almost all fonts from the Noto project installed. However, it's impossible for someone who uses MuseScore Studio to find out about this, and most of the Noto fonts are not pre-installed on Windows and Mac computers.
Without using the Noto fonts, some characters in Chinese and Japanese display incorrectly or not at all on Musescore.com (more information in #27554 and #27555). In languages like Balinese and Javanese, no characters are displayed at all. If MuseScore Studio directly told users to download and use appropriate fonts like the Noto fonts (or automatically installed them in the background), these problems could be prevented.
There is no public list of what fonts are installed on Musescore.com, and the support staff could not give me a detailed response when I asked for help. As a result, I could only find information about available fonts by uploading test scores with hundreds of font names in them. This feature may require the MuseScore Studio developers to keep an up-to-date list of the available fonts on Musescore.com.
Prior art
No response
Additional context
#17945 proposes a similar pop-up to tell the user that a score uses fonts that are not installed, and possibly prompt the user to substitute the fonts with other ones. This would also be useful, but it would not overlap with what I'm suggesting.
#27560 proposes an option to change multiple text styles at the same time. This would be useful once the user has installed the fonts and needs to change the score styles.
Checklist
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