 Many of the publishing clients I work for want to have their logos on the score and parts for the music they publish. Simple enough, and there are lots of different ways to do this depending on the notation program you use. Sibelius and Finale both have graphic tools, while Dorico’s page templates in Engrave Mode allow you to add graphics as needed. Another option is to use programs like Adobe Acrobat to add the images to various pages.
When using Acrobat, Dorico, or Finale, it’s easy to set the image to show up in the same location on the score and parts and have a consistent size. However, in Sibelius, it’s another matter. Unlike Finale, where you can place an image on the first page of the score and have it show up on all the parts, or Dorico, where you can adjust your part page template to include it, Sibelius has no direct way to place a single graphic that then appears on the score and all parts simultaneously. You can place the same graphic into the score and each individual part, but there is no way to have a consistent look and placement. Even when opening the inspector with the image selected, there are no options to set a repeatable placement location or resize the image to the same specifications on each part. It would be nearly impossible to place and resize the image on each part to exactly match all the others. In the past, I would finalize my score and parts, generate PDFs, and then add the image as a custom watermark in Acrobat, which gives precise controls over placement, size, and what pages it appears on. But what if you don’t want to spend hundreds of dollars on Acrobat, but still want the consistency that something like that will offer directly in Sibelius? I was pondering this problem several months ago and lamenting that Sibelius has no native way to achieve the results I could easily do in Finale or Dorico. Sibelius does have options to have elements show up on the score and parts in certain, consistent locations and sizes, like headers, footers, part names, etc., but they are all font styles and images cannot be fonts. That seemed like the end of the matter till I asked this simple question, “Wait, can an image be formatted in such a way that it could be used as a font?” Behold, an idea was born! To achieve this, it does involve some other programs, which you can download and use for free, or here’s a place where AI (shudder) may also help if you’re brave enough to use it. First, you take your image file and then convert it to a vector (.SVG) file. I used a program called Inkscape to help me do this, but this is a place where your AI of choice might be able to help as well. In short (and I’m certainly not an image editing expert), instead of having the image as a JPEG or other file format, you convert it to a vector file, which can then be coded into a font. Second, you need to create a custom font for this vector file. For this, I used IcoMoon, and once I uploaded the vector file, all I had to do was click “Generate Font.” The last step before downloading the font from IcoMoon was to assign a custom ligature (a series of letters or numbers, which are case-sensitive) to the image. That way, when you use this font in any program, it will behave just like any normal font, and you can type whatever you want. However, once you type in the specific ligature you assigned to the image, the image will appear like magic! Third, now download and install your new font. Once you’ve done that, open Sibelius and it’s time to put the new font to work. Go to the Text tab, open the font styles menu, and create a new font style, calling it something like Logos or whatever you want. Set the font to use your newly created logo font, set the font size (this is how you adjust the size of the image when placed in the score/part), and set the specific location you want. Hit OK, and that should be ready for you to use. Now create a new text using the new font style you created, type in the ligature for the image, and it should appear! Lastly, just test to see if the image shows up when generating a PDF. It should, but it’s always good to check. The best thing about this method is that you can now have repeatable and consistent sizing and placement of images throughout the score and all parts without having to place the image into each part and hoping you get the placement and size just right. If this feels like a lot of steps, I get that, but it’s actually a straightforward process. There are a few things to remember/consider:
The last thing to consider is that if you give your Sibelius file to someone else, they won’t have this custom font, and the image will not appear; it will just show the string of letters or numbers you used as the ligature for the image. Make sure you share your font and ligature code sheet with anyone who might need to open the Sibelius file, and even then, it’s best to generate a PDF for them as well to make sure they know how it should look in case something goes awry. Okay, that’s it! In an age where we seem to be converting text to images and even videos, this backwards method of converting an image to a usable font gives Sibelius an entirely new function that was not present in the program before. A classic workaround! Got questions? Reach out to me and let’s chat. Want help creating your own fonts for images or help with Sibelius template design all the way to formatting scores and parts for studio or stage? You got it; reach out and I’ll be happy to help!  One of the major themes I have experienced over the years I have used the 3 major music notation software options, Finale (over 25 years), Sibelius (over 17 years), and Dorico (3+ years), is that one notation choice or task has to be accomplished in very different ways in each software. The underlying logic and construction of each program inevitably lead to these sorts of differences. You can do just about anything in each program, but your path to get there will be very different. The task or notation style you’ll need to use for a given project may determine which software you use, since if there is one task that is crucial to the project and used often, it could be best to use the software where that task is the most streamlined and efficient.
As an engraver/copyist, I found that what I ultimately want is a hybrid of all this different software, where my favorite feature or concept from each could be incorporated into one grand vision. Well, I’m pretty sure that won’t happen, but I can dream. This is a refrain I’ve heard from a lot of people lately, especially as more people leave Finale behind and adopt another program. There are so many issues and inefficient workflows from Finale that I’m glad are no longer present in the more updated versions of Sibelius and Dorico, but there is one general concept/architecture in Finale that I still think is the best and most flexible. Though much maligned, I think Finale’s expression category designer/menu setup offers the most robust and customizable experience for creating various text and other symbols that are placed in the music. For shame, you say! Not so, you say! Well, let me explain. As I mentioned in a previous blog, Finale can do anything you want it to do (what it does for you is another matter). You can create and adjust just about anything you can think of having to do with the notation. This is where the expression menu shines; you can create custom expression categories, set rules for each category, or you can take every single expression, no matter what the category, and create custom rules for placement, style, fonts, and behavior right in the individual settings for the expression that are then independent of the rest of the expressions in that category. Options as to where the expression attaches, text alignment, and even specifying on which staves an expression will appear in the score and parts (which can also be independent) are far more powerful and customizable than anything Sibelius or Dorico has. Case in point, I work with a publisher who has specified a text style where markings like “Verse” or “Chorus” appear on the top staff of the score (this is an orchestral score) and then on the top staff of the grand staff rhythm part. However, in the parts, these markings should not appear at all except in the rhythm part. The next wrinkle is that we often hide the top staff of the rhythm part when there are only slashes and chord changes. In Finale, you can create a custom “Score list” to accomplish this, no problem. In Sibelius, you can mimic it within the Font Style by selecting the various positions for the text to appear, but there are no independent controls for the score or parts, and the options are far more limited and inflexible than in Finale. Dorico, between a combination of paragraph styles and layout options, can also do something similar, but it’s very cumbersome and again, does not offer nearly the number of options as Finale does. Another example of how Finale’s expression designer’s independent options can be used is creating custom auto-sequencing expressions. Using the kind of expressions from the last examples, let’s say you wanted to have each Verse or Chorus numbered, like Verse 1, Verse 2, Chorus 1, Chorus 2, etc. Again, in Finale, this is no problem. Just create separate expressions for each text, add the auto-sequencing style of choice, and you’re all set. By creating separate expressions for each, you could have a situation where there is only 1 Verse marking, but there might be 4 or 5 Chorus markings that would all sequence independently of each other. Also, if you wanted to remove or add a marking, the subsequent markings would all adjust accordingly, i.e., if you want to add a new Chorus marking in a new measure between the original Chorus 2 and 3 markings, the newly added Chorus marking will become Chorus 3 and the original Chorus 3 will automatically update to be Chorus 4. Sibelius and Dorico both have options to create auto-sequencing markings, but only one marking sequences at a time, and there is no way to create multiple markings that use multiple, independent sequences. This blog is not meant to say how good Finale was or how far behind Sibelius or Dorico are. Finale is actually far behind both of those programs in so many ways, and as we all know, it’s not going to get any better. My point in this was to explain how certain tasks or notation options are vastly different between the programs. I have created clones of each template I’ve created in each software to have options in the other programs. Templates I’ve built in Finale now have clones in Dorico and Sibelius; templates I built in Sibelius also have Finale and Dorico equivalents, etc. That way, no matter what program I use, the look and feel of the final product can be as close as possible to the original. This process forces me to explore all the deep and overlooked functions and interplays of various settings in each program, and that’s often where I find the limitations of what can be done in each program (or at least done somewhat easily). As you work in any of these programs, remember, there may be limitations you are not used to from another software or, even better, new options and techniques open to you that weren’t present in your previous program of choice. Just be patient and keep exploring, but don’t forget to bring what you learned from the old notation software to your new one. Got more questions, reach out and let’s explore these together!  For all the time we as composers, orchestrators, and copyists spend learning the notation software of choice, there are other tools that come alongside those that help with certain tasks either before or after the actual notation is set. Programs like Acrobat, PDF Expert, the various PDF utilities from Notation Central/NYC Music Services, and file management programs like Renamer all help with various tasks that are technically outside the realm of actual music notation. Another group of programs are music scanners, which started out as tools for archivists to scan old manuscripts for digital preservation and over the years evolved into larger software suites that offer various digital tools once you’ve scanned the music.
One of the latest entrants into this field is PlayScore 2, which uses “Optical Music Recognition” (or OMR) to scan the music, whether by taking an actual picture of the printed sheet music or loading a PDF into the app. Once the music is scanned, the OMR system will read the music and play it back for you. This is an amazing practice tool for students, teachers, choir directors, etc., where someone can upload the music, isolate their part to practice or mute their instrument and practice along with the accompaniment as the app plays the other instruments. All these features are powerful, but seemingly not very useful for us in the music notation engraving side of things. Au contraire, my friends. The OMR system, as part of its core function, reads and digitizes the music for playback and that data can then be exported as a MIDI or a MusicXML file. Pure gold, right! Now, if you have an old piece of sheet music that you were going to have to reengrave by hand or a piece that you need to transpose but only have a PDF, PlayScore 2 can now do a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of getting the music digitized. How well this works is another question. Recently, I started working as part of a team of engravers for a publisher and one of the main tasks is taking older titles in their collection and reengraving them in the newest template so the titles can be released again. As these pieces are out of print, often I only have scans of old printed copies or PDFs of the original material, no source notation files to start with and then, there are often multiple files, done by different engravers originally and all of them need to be digitized to create the new version. I decided to use PlayScore 2 as my first step in recreating the new versions and was pleasantly surprised at how accurate the scans were and how the musicxml conversion worked. PlayScore 2 could scan an entire score, admittedly, not a very complex one, and export the entire document in minutes and then I’d load it directly into my template and get to work. Brilliant! However, as you will know if you’ve ever used a MusicXML file to go between different music notation software, the conversion is rarely perfect, and it can often be easier and faster to just reinput the music yourself as the XML conversion can often have unexpected errors and elements misplaced all over the score. In this case, given the scores were not complex, I wanted to see if PlayScore 2 would save me time editing its work or if reinputting entirely myself would be faster. After trying three titles with PlayScore 2, I can honestly say it cut down my time by about a third. Yes, there were lots of edits I still had to make, i.e., it rarely got any kind of duplet, beyond a triplet, notated correctly so I learned that I would have to do those measures by hand, but largely, PlayScore 2 recognized the notes, rhythms, slurs, ties, articulations, and even lyrics (again, with some editing for sure) and translated them accurately. Emboldened by this, I then tried to use PlayScore 2 on a different, much more complex project of reengraving some art song pieces for vocal and piano to eventually be transposed. This project was definitely beyond what it could handle. The music was far too complex and the original PDFs, while they were beautifully engraved, had different notation elements that PlayScore just could not recognize. I wasn’t entirely surprised by this, and of the eight pieces I had to reengrave, I only ended up using PlayScore on four of them, again with some serious editing. On the other four, after seeing the musicxml conversion, I knew it would take too long to edit what PlayScore gave me vs just doing it by hand myself. Music notation engraving, I feel, like any other kind of craftsmanship, focuses on how well you use the tools at your disposal. Anyone can buy a saw or a hammer, or a music notation software for that matter, but the real skill comes from using these tools, over and over again, to perfect your craft and then finding and developing new tools to supplement those core competencies. As I have used PlayScore 2, like those other programs I mentioned before, I have found that not only is it helpful, but it has opened up other workflows and possibilities for me. Is it perfect? No, but knowing how to use a new tool and what its limitations are, means you can get more and more out of that tool and know when it’ll be helpful. So, if you, like many others I’m sure, are looking at old catalogs of pieces from decades ago, wondering what to do with them, or think, since there are only PDFs that nothing can be changed or altered, it might be time to look at something like PlayScore 2 and dream of what it could help you with. There are other music scanning programs, but the cost ($60 per year or a monthly subscription) and features it offers might just make it the newest tool—or, if I may use a slight pun, the newest piece of playground equipment—for you to enjoy!  I’ve written at some length about designing notation templates (read some previous blog posts here), but now I want to explore some general guidelines on using your templates for various projects. But wait, you say, I thought the whole idea of creating a template was to use it for every project, in the same way, every time. Or is this some strange grammatical puzzle? I promise you, it’s not a trick of English grammar (there are enough of those already), or that I’ve led you astray on my template recommendations. Let’s dive in.
What really affects the way in which you use a template starts with two factors: 1) Where is the project starting? (There’s a sub-question here about what role you have in the project, but I’ll cover that another time.) 2) What notation program are you using? The first question is concerned with what format the notation starts. I know a lot of composers still begin their works with pencil and staff paper, sketching out ideas and melodies here. If this is where you are starting, whether you are the composer, arranger, orchestrator, or copyist, then the answer to the second question of which notation software you use is a personal preference. Any full-featured notation software will do, and if you have a template all set and ready to go, just start inputting your notes and you’re off and running. If you are starting your sketches in a notation program from the beginning, then the process is the same. Starting the notation process here is an example of working “in” a template, meaning you have created the template to be an environment in which you work, and everything started and finished in this template will now have all the characteristics and functions you want since you began the process in the template. Where things become less straightforward is a situation like this: what if you are given the task of updating an existing notation file? In this case, the notation may come to you in various conditions and needs to be revised and modified. This is primarily where I start on a project; a composer, arranger, orchestrator, etc., has a piece of music that needs to be cleaned up and formatted properly for the specific use. If this is where you are starting, reinputting the entire piece by hand would likely be impractical or impossible given the time or budgetary constraints of the project. This is where the question of whether you rework the piece “into” your template or impose “onto” the piece the settings from your template comes in play. For a Finale user, this is a job for copying the original piece into your template. For shame, you say! Once I copy this other piece into my Finale template, the articulations may not match the settings in the template, and the expressions are all wrong and using the wrong settings! How is working in a template helpful when what you’ve copied into it looks wrong? Relax, breathe… Finale’s expression menu and articulation design menu make it easy (to a degree) to correct this. For example, let’s say you have a lot of different text directions, like pizz. or arco, that are not using the correct font style or placement now that you’ve copied them into the template. All you need to do is go into the expression menu, find all the different texts you copied in, move them to the correct expression category that has the settings you want, and then click the dropdown menu to reset font and position, and then you’re done. Go out of the expression tool, highlight the staves you want, and go to utilities/change/expressions… and hit ok to reset the position of all the expressions. Now, these will use the correct fonts and have the correct spacing as if you had created them in the correct expression category to begin with. You can also do a similar method in the articulation menu. If there is a staccato marking from the old file that isn’t the one you want to use, simply select it, delete it, and then from the pop-up menu, select replace and find the correct one you had in the template already, hit ok, and then all occurrences of that articulation will be the one you originally designed in the template. Go back out of the articulation tool, highlight the staves you want, go to utilities/change/articulations, reset the position, and everything will now appear as you originally intended. If you are a Sibelius user, the concept of copying into a template also works, but the process of resetting different elements changes. Once you’ve copied in the notation, highlight what you want, and go to the appearance tab and select reset design and reset position. These should generally update everything to look and behave like the settings you already have in the template. If you have lots of custom font styles for symbols and other elements, it will be a longer process to get those looking exactly as you intended, but it’s still possible. A new and often better method is to import an old file into your template using the file/import function. From this menu, you can assign the existing staves to the corresponding instruments in your template and keep the settings from your template (make sure to uncheck settings that import the house style from the old file), and away you go. There is still a good bit of updating to do after this, but this is a very useful method. Sibelius also offers a way to impose your template settings onto an existing file by using a house style. First, go to your template file, export the house style, and then import it into the file you are updating. Once you do this, follow that reset procedure from above. A house style will take settings and presets from your template file and superimpose them onto another file, making the settings in this old file the same (largely) as your template. In my experience, this isn’t a foolproof method, but it does work and can be a great way to import all the various settings from a template to a new file without having to go line by line and find them all and change them. Where Finale uses a “copy into a template” workflow, and Sibelius can use either a “copy into a template” or “impose settings from a template onto a new file” option, Dorico squarely falls in the onto camp. The limitations and imperfections of the import house style function in Sibelius are completely absent from Dorico. Dorico’s library manager feature is incredibly powerful and user-friendly. First, open your template and navigate to Library> Export Library. Save the file. Now go to the piece you’re updating and go to library/library manager. From her,e either select that library file or drag the icon of your Dorico template file into this menu. Dorico will now have a long list of all the various settings in the correct file that don’t match the library from your template. Simply click to change all the settings you want (or click the major categories of notation options, engraving options, layout options, etc.) and Dorico will take care of the rest. It’s very effective, and I’ve found it to be seamless in almost all instances I’ve used it. Next, you can also import page template sets in engrave mode (again, export these from your template), and you can use them in this file. Now, all the engraving, notation, and layout settings and your page templates are the same in the old file as your template file. Ok, I know that was a lot to digest, but as you can see, depending on which notation software you are using and where the project begins can change how you use your template. Remember, your templates aren’t just a file; they should contain concepts, workflows, and ideas that can be used on any file. This makes your template more useful and flexible, saving you time and headaches. Got questions, contact me and I’d be happy to help. |
AuthorSammy Sanfilippo, CEO of Engraver's Mark Music Archives
August 2026
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