Font Utilities dialog box

How to get there

Choose Document > Data Check > Font Utilities.

What it does

This dialog box tells Finale to inspect the font of every musical element in your piece—articulations, expression marks, chord symbols, the music itself—in search of the font you’ve specified, and replace each occurrence of it with a different font you specify. This is particularly useful if, for example, you decide you want to change the font for all your tempo markings at once, or all your chord symbol suffixes.

This dialog box also includes variety of commands related to font management, including dealing with fonts in files opened cross-platform.

Basic tab

  • Search For This Font • Select. Click here to select the font, size and/or style to search for. Finale presents the Font dialog box.
  • Replace With This Font • Select. Click here to select the font, size and/or style with which to replace the found items. Finale presents the Font dialog box again.
  • Apply Changes to Fonts in Shapes. This option determines whether Finale searches shapes, as well as text, for font changes when you select any of the data check options relating to fonts. When this option is not selected, Finale only searches text—such as text expressions, lyrics, staff and group names, text blocks—for font changes. Finale does not change the fonts for any font characters embedded in shapes.

    When Apply Changes to Fonts in Shapes is selected, any data check operation may take slightly longer, depending on the number of shapes and the fonts used in the shapes.

  • Apply SMuFL Conversion. This option is only available when a SMuFL-compliant font is chosen as the replacement font and the Scale Font Size radio button is not selected. This will utilize character conversion to match the replacement characters and their positioning as closely as possible. It is recommended to keep this option checked when replacing music fonts.
  • Scale Font Size to: _%. Enter a value in this text box to change the size of a font throughout the Finale document.
  • Check Document Fonts Against System Fonts. Choose this menu item to compare the font list in the file opened to the font list of the computer being used.

Advanced tab

Noteman says: If a font is marked as a non-Symbol Font on the first computer, then opened on a computer where it is marked as a Symbol Font, selecting this option will mark all the text as Symbol Font text, BUT WILL NOT RE-ENCODE THAT TEXT. This is a limitation of cross-platform encoding; it cannot be done reliably more than once. When text is re-encoded upon opening a document, any attempt to undo it (by encoding it for the opposite platform) will not yield reliable results.

See also:

Data Check submenu

Document menu