Legni is a family of fonts allowing the quick, intuitive and flexible creation of fingering diagrams for woodwind instruments. Legni includes fonts for all modern woodwinds in their most common variant. (For information on additional instruments, see “Further Development”.)
Anyone may download and use the fonts freely, with no limitations or annoying reminders. However, a great deal of work went into this project so if you find Legni useful please contribute and support further development. For this reason, if you would like to share Legni fonts with another person please direct them to this website (www.legnifont.com) rather than emailing or otherwise sharing the files directly.
What are the advantages of a font?
Fingering diagrams can be notoriously difficult to incorporate into text or music. Solutions range from simply scanning a hand-drawn fingering diagram to using a specially prepared graphic. However, both of these methods share two drawbacks. First, any alteration requires the entire scan or graphic be redone. Second, the graphic will suffer from pixelization if enlarged from its original size.
Often, graphics are abandoned entirely and the fingering is reduced to simple text. This leaves the reader to deal with an occasionally bewildering array of unclear key names or arbitrary numbers.
In contrast, fingering diagrams rendered as fonts can be easily created and modified in any application with word processing capability. Such diagrams are readily understandable and could be enlarged to fill an entire banner without loss of resolution.
What are the disadvantages of a font?
Though I have made every effort to make the process as intuitive as possible, fingering diagram entry in Legni requires some familiarization with the fonts. There is simply no 100% intuitive way to assign woodwind fingerings onto a computer keyboard.
Additionally, for certain projects graphics may be necessary or otherwise easier to work with. In these situations I highly recommend Bret Pimentel's Fingering Diagram Builder, accessible from his website (www.bretpimental.com).
Legni Family
The Legni family consists of the following fonts:
- Legni FluteV (Boehm-system flute & piccolo, vertical layout)
- Legni FluteH (Boehm-system flute & piccolo, horizontal layout)
- Legni Oboe (conservatoire-system oboe)
- Legni OboeEngHn (conservatoire-system English horn)
- Legni Clarinet (Boehm-system clarinets)
- Legni ClarinetBass (Boehm-system low clarinets)
- Legni Bassoon (Heckel-system bassoon)
- Legni BassoonCbsn (Heckel-system contrabassoon)
- Legni Saxophone (all sizes of saxophone)
The following fonts from the in-development Holzblaeser and Bois families are also available:
- Holzblaeser Recorder (all sizes of recorder)
- Holzblaeser EarlyReeds (crumhorn, sordune, rackett)
- Holzblaeser Simple (simple flutes and winds with up to 10 holes and no keys, vertical)
- Bois Sarrusophone (all sizes of sarrusophone)
- Bois Ophicleide (9-, 10-, and 11-key ophicleides)
- Bois Ocarina (12-hole transverse ocarina)