As someone who has never looked at a jazz score, can you share an example of how jazz sheet music would benefit from different fonts?
As someone who has never looked at a jazz score, can you share an example of how jazz sheet music would benefit from different fonts?
It's just an entrenched aesthetic preference. Jazz fonts (fonts in this context refers both to the words and the music symbols) tend to be quite heavy with thick lines. I've heard that the thick hand-written style was originally to make charts more readable in dimly lit clubs, but with tablets and such, that's an anachronism now.
You can look at samples of Hal Leonard's Real Book(s) on their website to get a sense of what it looks like. Again, just an aesthetic preference, but one I and many others hold nonetheless.
I also don't love the conventional handwritten aesthetic you often see for jazz fonts. For a project I've been working on, I ended up pulling the handful of chord symbol glyphs out of MuseScore's Leland Text font and adjusting them for use in the UI since I couldn't find a suitable option out there.