212: Noteheads - no music appears

Missing noteheads or noteheads replaced by squares or other curious markings can occur for a variety of reasons such as upgrading or reinstalling Sibelius.

Often the problem can easily be solved by downloading and installing the latest version of Scorch from our website. Doing so will refresh the Opus and Inkpen fonts in your computer's Fonts directory. Do not choose to reinstall Scorch from your Sibelius CD - always install from the website for the most current version. If this does not help, please see below.

Mac

Sibelius 4 or later:

First, quit Sibelius and delete the Sibelius fonts from the following locations:

Macintosh HD/Library/Fonts
Macintosh HD/Users/[YourUserName]/Library/Fonts

Delete any fonts that start with these names:

Helsinki
Inkpen
Inkpen2
Opus
Reprise

Once you have deleted these you should empty the trash. When Sibelius 4 or 5 starts up it checks to see if the fonts are there and reinstalls them if they are missing. If you're using Sibelius 6 you will need to reinstall Scorch from here, which will reinstall the fonts for you.

Windows XP or later

First, quit Sibelius and go to Start, Control Panel, Fonts. Delete all the fonts with the following names:

Helsinki
Inkpen
Inkpen2
Opus
Reprise

Once you have deleted these you should empty the Recycle bin. Now, reinstall Scorch, which will reinstall the Sibelius fonts again. This is generally quicker than reinstalling Sibelius from the disc.

You can download the Scorch installer from here.

Windows 95, 98, Me

If no noteheads display in Scorch or Sibelius, and the music does not display or print correctly, you probably have too many fonts installed on your system.

Versions of Windows up to Me (i.e. 95, 98, Me) have an undocumented ceiling on the number of fonts you can have installed on your computer. Once you have more than this number of fonts installed, your computer may not be able to install new fonts correctly. Having a large number of fonts can also cause your computer to run more slowly and it will take, for example, longer to load Windows and to run programs.

To solve this problem, you should remove as many of the extra fonts as possible, and then reinstall the Sibelius music fonts.

First, quit all running programs. Go to Start > Settings > Control Panel > Fonts and temporarily copy as many fonts as possible to another folder on your computer. You should aim to have less than 100 fonts on your computer.

Once you have removed surplus fonts, download and install the Sibelius fonts using the links below.

• Sibelius 2 and Scorch users: click here
• Sibelius 1.x users: click here

When the file has downloaded, double-click it to install the fonts. We recommend that you restart your computer after downloading these fonts.