Hello All–
I stumbled across an interesting typographical limit: 200%. In most text editors you can produce a character that is any % you want (perhaps up to 1000). This makes sense since fonts are “simply” vector definitions (I’m sure I’m way oversimplifying this. Daniel, please forgive me!). There is a fairly low limit for text character size in Dorico.
Now you might be asking yourself, why does that matter? Who needs a letter larger than 200%?
Specialized fonts. There are interesting fonts that exist with specialized characters that are not comprised of alphabetical characters. For instance, I use a font that makes beautiful calligraphic text frames of the sort you might find on a wedding invitation or an early edition of Hayden or Beethoven. One of the things I positively love about dorico is the very powerful and forward-thinking way the team established graphical and text frames. These features have performed quite beautifully and satisfactorily for me with the exception of the typographical size limit. If the size limit was increased, I could use my frames font to create a title page with beautiful calligraphic borders in one text box and the actual text centered within it in another.
As always, thank you development team!
(NB: It’s been a while since I’ve opened dorico… I think the limit is actually 260%? Feel free to correct me.)
In this particular case, the frame required a font size of 400. Since it is a font, these frames can be rendered by any application that can render text. That’s the beauty of it. It doesn’t have to be an imported graphic.
I think you can see how beautiful frames like these could be used in a very tasteful way when emulating old editions which were rife with beautiful calligraphic scripts!
Well, tbh, I have no idea what you’re talking about. I know there is not perfect symmetry, but this is meant to emulate a fountain pen drawing which would have different line weights depending on the direction of the stroke.
I can see it’s meant to emulate a pen drawing, but it doesn’t. Look at the loop in the bottom left corner - there is no change of thickness as the pen goes round a full 360 degrees.
I can see a few of the other mistakes now too. You’ll have to take it up with the “font” designer. Regardless, I still like it and we have completely derailed the point of the thread. I would like to be able to use special fonts and I’m guessing there may be others that might find a use (for their own reasons) for making the font character size limit larger too.
Although the need for point sizes larger than 200pt is obviously pretty marginal, this is of course a legitimate use case, so I will make a note of this.
Thank you, Daniel. LeifG, I’ll have to go digging around. I actually purchased a license for this font a few months ago so I could use it in publications but that was then and this is now. I’ll try and find the website where I found it. It is free to use but if you want to sell any scores with these frames I believe the designer wanted $10.
I never responded to this: the font is called “calligraphic frames soft”. Yahoogle it and it should pop up.
I’ve also come across another project where I’d like to use one of these frames and there’s still a 200% limit. As Daniel said, this is a marginal issue, but I’d sure love to not have to take my score into a PDF editor for this single element.
Just out of curiosity. Have you tried to save the character you want in SVG and add it to Dorico using an image frame? Would this solve your problem of using a PDF editor? (I don’t know, I am taking a shot in the dark).
No I haven’t. The problem is there are probably 60 different frames that are a part of the font, and sometimes I change the frames depending on the project. Nevertheless, it might be worth a shot.
