Re: Opinions: expressive text and markup sizes

[Abraham Lee]

Hi, Ben!

On Sun, Jul 8, 2018 at 11:38 AM Ben <address@hidden> wrote:

Hello everyone,

I was wondering if I could get some feedback and opinions on something that's been on my mind today. I've been working for a while now on a small set of chamber pieces (score & parts = letter-size) and my eyes are playing tricks on me I think...

Question: what are you all using for your markup font sizes for expressive and technique texts in your scores? For instance, pizz, simile, sempre, etc.

Are you using \italic? \abs-fontsize or \fontsize? \teeny?

As I prepare to work on more large scale works (11x17 score, letter parts), I've been reconsidering my style sheet and markup size choices, so I was curious what you all do in your projects. Do you scale them all up or...my eyes are wonky, the more I stare at the page the more I have no idea what I'm thinking. ;)

Thanks for any feedback! Hope you're having a great weekend.

My personal preference, based on my own typographic observation and testing, is that the eye is used to seeing and recognizing symbols that are around a staff-space tall (like note heads). Thus, I tend to make all text sized such that they have an x-height of approximately one staff-space (or maybe a little bit less and rarely more). Since every font is designed and configured differently, there’s not a single font size that works for any font choice. This is important for lyrics especially, but other kinds of markup  text like technique and _expression_ text can really benefit from it. Keeping the text around this size makes it work at almost all global staff sizes.

Hope that helps,

Abraham