Cavatina – a font for musical notation

Alexis Luengas

Hi everybody! After two years of hard work in design and programming, I am proud to announce the release of Cavatina: an experimental font for musical notation.

Cavatina is my misuse (to put it nicely) of the OpenType font architecture, inspired by Travis Kochel's FF Chartwell. Similarly, the font relies on contextual alternates and ligatures to take care of the formatting and allow the support of a wide range of musical grammar. Among others, it is possible to write over four octaves of different notes, key and time signatures, barlines, accidentals, articulations as well as ornamentation, providing a system robust enough to allow fast musical composition. Additionally, I have written an open-source converter that translates the Cavatina text files to MIDI and MusicXML. A browser based text editor with integrated MIDI playback is also provided for the majority of those who don’t have a Mac.

Without any further talk, go check out the website: cavatinafont.com.
To test the font you can go through the quick start. You don’t have to be a musician to understand how it works.




Have a look at it and tell me what you think!