FL is all very well, of course, but to make it real and useful, there need to be music fonts that demonstrate the standard enter Bravura. Bravura. The above image shows Bravura in action its the first two bars of Fibichs Nlada Op. No. 1. 39. You can click on the image to see a larger version, or you can download a PDF of the whole page. The music is set in Sibelius, rather than in our new application, by the way. The word Bravura comes from the Italian word for bold, and also, of course, has a meaning in music, referring to a virtuosic passage or performance both of these associations are quite apt for the font. Free Font New Century Schoolbook' title='Free Font New Century Schoolbook' />In keeping with our desire to draw on the best of pre computer music engraving, Bravura is somewhat bolder than most other music fonts, as this comparison of the treble G clef shows Bravuras clef is the rightmost clef in the above example. It has a very classical appearance, similar to Opus, Sonata and Maestro, but more substantial than all of them. Emmentaler, the most stylised of the clefs above, is the font used by Lilypond and Muse. Score. Here is another comparison, showing the eighth note quaver from each of the above fonts Again, Bravura is the rightmost example. The notehead is nice and oval, though not as wide as Opus an exceptionally wide notehead, and relatively large in comparison to the space size, aiding legibility. The stem thickness is also boldest for Bravura, though this is only the precomposed note from the font when a music font is used in most scoring applications, the stem thickness can be adjusted by the user. Here are a few other symbols from Bravura, to illustrate its classical design That rightmost symbol is the percussion pictogram for sandpaper blocks, by the way. The small, semibold numerals immediately to the left are for figured bass. You will notice that there are few sharp corners on any of the glyphs. This mimics the appearance of traditionally printed music, where ink fills in slightly around the edges of symbols. All of the basic glyphs were modeled after the Not a set dry transfer system, as mentioned in a previous post. Originals were scanned, examined at high magnification, and then hand drawn using Adobe Illustrator by yours truly. I have shared the resulting designs with a number of expert engravers, who have given me invaluable feedback on details large and small, and many of the symbols have already been through many revisions. The result of many hundreds of hours of work, I hope you will agree that Bravura gives a very fine, classical appearance. There is still much work to do, since our own application is not yet at a sufficiently advanced stage of development that all of the glyphs in the font are being used, and there are details such as ligatures and stylistic alternates to be considered as well. But we are making Bravura available now in support of the effort to continue developing SMu. FL. Even better, Steinberg is making Bravura available under the SIL Open Font License. This means that Bravura is free to download, and you can use it for any purpose, including bundling it with other software, embedding it in documents, or even using it as the basis for your own font. The only limitations placed on its use are that it cannot be sold on its own any derivative font cannot be called Bravura or contain Bravura in its name and any derivative font must be released under the same permissive license as Bravura itself. If you use Finale or Sibelius and want to use Bravura for your own scores, unfortunately you cannot use the font unmodified, as neither Finale nor Sibelius yet supports SMu. FL, and there are technical restrictions on accessing the font or characters at the Unicode code points where they exist. Nevertheless, if you would like to download Bravura to try it out, you can do so from the SMu. FL web site. If you are a font designer and you would like to contribute improvements or modifications to the glyphs included in Bravura, were definitely open to including them just drop me a line with details.