Lassus Fonts

The original Lassus font was designed by David Rakowski and has been licensed by The Really Loud Font Company from Intecsas oHG. The Really Loud Font Company has modified the metrics of the original Lassus font to create Lassus Regular. Lassus Regular itself forms the basis for Lassus Default and Lassus MM, two additional fonts included with Lassus Regular. The Lassus Chords font (also included) allows for the notation of simple homophony. David Rakowski's original documentation for Lassus provides a description of the basic Lassus font, which has become Lassus Regular:

The Lassus font is a font modeled on early European moveable type, circa 16th century, in which each character holds a length of five-line musical staff and a musical character. The notation is, however, modern, with the look of 19th- and 20th-century notation. The font is not intended for serious musical notation, but is intended for the notation of quick musical examples to be placed in a word-processed document. With the Lassus font, going back and forth between a word processing program and a drawing or music notation program is unnecessary. (N.B.: the notation in the font is modern notation, not sixteenth-century notation.) The details of the font are very fine, and are far too fine to show up completely on a computer monitor, even at sizes as great as 127 points. However, printing to a 300-dpi device will come out just fine, providing the point size you use is about 36 or greater. For general examples (I use this font for handouts for my counterpoint class), I like to use this font at 48 points.

The Lassus Regular font provides unbeamed eighth, quarter, half and whole note characters as well as stemless notes for pitch-class and analytic notations. All characters are notated with the same width, making Lassus Regular the musical equivalent of a monospaced text font, such as Courier. Accidentals, dots, ties and clefs are included. A key caps and ASCII chart are supplied to assist the user in creating lines of notation. The example at left is notated in Lassus Regular. Click on the example to ftp a PostScript rendering of the example to your local disk.

The Lassus Default font has a character set identical to that of Lassus Regular, but with character widths sized in proportions taken from the Default Allotment File (included with the Basic Set and with the Supplementary Allotment Set). The example at right is notated in Lassus Default. Click on the example to ftp a PostScript rendering of the example to your local disk.

Finally, the metrics of Lassus Regular and Lassus Default have been used to create LassusMM a (MacOS only) MultiMaster Font which allows the user to select the degree of proportionality in the character widths of the quarters, eighths, halves and whole notes in the Lassus font. The LassusMM font ranges over width values from 300 (Lassus Default) to 1000 (Lassus Regular).

The animated graphic at right shows how an example appears when set in various flavors of LassusMM. Notice how the amount of space allocated to the quarters and halves increases proportionately while the widths of the eights and clef remain constnt. Adobe Type Manager 4.0 or Adobe's Font Creator utility is required to generate specific MultiMaster instances.

Finally, the Lassus Chords family allows for the notation of simple polyphony in a manner similar to that employed by the Lassus family. Lassus Chords has the same character set as Lassus but uses overprinting characters to allow for simple polyphonic notation. Like Lassus, the Lassus Chords family consists of monospaced (LassusChordsRegular), proportional (LassusChordsDefault), and MultiMaster (LassusChordsMM) fonts. The example at left is notated in LassusChordsRegular. Click on the example to ftp a PostScript rendering to your local disk.