Publishing with Sibelius

The highest quality finished results

Elegant layout

Sibelius's unique page layout means that you won't have to worry about spacing, formatting, or how your score will look when it's printed. The music is beautifully laid out onto pages for you as you work – you don't need to think about it. If bars get too cramped, Sibelius pushes them onto the next page for you, and instantly adjusts slurs, hairpins etc. to suit. Even if you delete large sections, or change the shape of the paper, Sibelius will reformat the whole score in an instant.

But if you prefer, you can change the layout yourself: you can move staves around, specify where systems and pages end, alter note spacings, and squash up or spread out whole passages of music. You're in complete control.

House Styles™ & engraving rules

Sibelius makes your scores look stunning, because it automatically applies hundreds of subtle music engraving rules to optimize every aspect of your score’s appearance. These include Sibelius's unique Optical™ and Magnetic™ algorithms for positioning notes, ties, beams, accidentals, slurs, etc.

You can set ‘House Style’ options to emulate the high-quality appearance of famous publishers, or design your own house style(s) to make your scores look distinctive. A whole menu of options is included, to control everything from text styles and notehead shapes to complex engraving rules.

Control parameters such as beam angles individually or by adjusting Sibelius’s engraving rules

You can even save house styles to disk and import them into other scores.

Watch movie: Layout & house styles »

Graphics & color

Sibelius imports color and black-and-white graphics, for adding pictures, logos, photos, cover pages and special notations to your music. Sibelius comes with dozens of graphics ready to use – or create your own.

You can color in notes, text, symbols, etc. - useful for educational music, marking up sketches, and making important markings stand out. They print in color, too.

Watch movie: Graphics & Color »

Watch movie: Exporting graphics »

Colored staves

Color anything in

You can also export music from Sibelius to graphics, desktop publishing and word processor programs in a variety of standard file formats, e.g. EPS and TIFF. This makes it easy to incorporate music into anything from coursework and exam papers, to books and posters.

No ‘faking’

Sibelius automatically handles many tricky notations that other programs have to fake, such as: collisions between voices (layers), multi-arc slurs with any number of arcs, beams over rests and across barlines, cross-staff beams between three staves, text and wavy lines at any angle (e.g. gliss.), and ossias.

Music fonts & symbols

Sibelius’s standard music fonts Opus™ and Helsinki™ produce an exceptionally high-quality engraved appearance, supplied with alternative noteheads conforming to the US Music Publishers’ Association design standards. Also included is Inkpen2™, a font which simulates handwritten music and text (read more).

Sibelius’s fonts include over 500 music symbols you can use, such as special noteheads, percussion markings, ornaments and avant garde notations.

But you’re not just limited to our fonts. Sibelius is compatible with all the best-known music fonts, including Petrucci™, Jazz™, Susato™, Sonata™, Tamburo™ and Ghent™. You can even design your own symbols using any combination of characters from any mixture of fonts.

Hundreds of customizable symbols