Sibelius 7 treats 3rd-party music fonts incorrectly

Sibelius 7.x for Windows does not work correctly with third-party music fonts, encoded as Symbol Fonts. This is most obvious in the "Edit Symbol" dialog, where Sibelius 7.x for Windows incorrectly displays the glyphs for 0x0000 to 0x00ff instead of the correct glyphs for 0xf000 to 0xf0ff. This bug affects: - Sibelius 7.x for Windows; - when used with certain 3rd-party music fonts (such as the Finale fonts, the Urtext fonts, the Norfolk fonts, or any other font which emulates the special symbol mapping of the music fonts shipped with Sibelius); - the fonts affected are those whose glyphs are character-encoded as "Symbol Fonts", not text fonts. This bug does not affect versions of Sibelius earlier than 7.0. Instructions for reproduction of an example of incorrect behaviour: 1. Configure Text Style "Common symbols" to use a 3rd-party music font (e.g. Maestro or Norfolk Std); 2. Click tab Notations -> Symbols -> (dialogue opener) Edit Symbols -> double-click symbol Trill** (first symbol in Ornaments); 3. Scroll down to locate the selected symbol: it is not a Trill!!; 4. What is seen is "Fig 1 - Symbol display incorrect with any 3rd party font in Sib 7.png": these are the symbols from the incorrect range 0x0000-0x00ff in the font; 5. Now return Text Style "Common Symbols" to use a shipped Sibelius font, such as Opus Std; 6. Click tab Notations -> Symbols -> (dialogue opener) Edit Symbols -> double-click symbol Trill; 7. Scroll down to locate the selected symbol: it is a Trill, correctly; 8. What is seen is "Fig 2 - Symbol display correct with Opus fonts in Sib 7.png": these are the symbols from the correct range 0xf000-0xf0ff in the font; 9. Now do the same experiment in Sibelius 6 with a 3rd-party font; 10. Observe that Sibelius 6 displays the 3rd-party symbols correctly, as in: "Fig 3 - Symbol display correct with any 3rd party font in Sibelius 6.png" ** This bug is not specific to the Trill, the Trill is just a "for example" of a symbol whose Sibelius number is above 128. Some background: Music symbol fonts encoded as "Symbol Fonts" have the glyphs for Sibelius symbol numbers 0 to 255 mapped into character codes 0xf000 to 0xf0ff, and again, duplicated, at the Unicode code points which correspond to the Unicode mapping of the legacy 8-bit Mac OS Roman characters 0 to 255. For the half-range 0 to 127, this means that the characters mapped into 0x0000 to 0x007f duplicate those mapped into 0xf000 to 0xf07f (because Mac OS Roman 0-127 matches Unicode 0-127). There is no such easy relationship for codes 128 to 255, as the Unicode mappings for Mac OS Roman 128 to 255 are scattered around, and not even all in the range 0x0080 to 0x00ff.

Comments (3) Bugs , font, symbol