Have you ever noticed how older scores typeset abbreviated instrument names (e.g. “K.-Fag.” (contrabassoon)): the abbreviation dot and hyphen are overlapping / combined into one horizontal space.
Has anyone used this in Dorico? It’s a minor detail, but every bit of horizontal space saved may count.
Surprisingly, in the vast jungle of unicode symbols, there doesn’t seem to be a combined hyphen and dot character like this…
I was able to fake it by writing “K.Fag.”, then selecting the first dot and applying a strike-through, which gives this result:
The “fake hyphen” is very thin… however, if no other hyphens appear in the staff labels, it may not be all too jarring. Does anybody know a way to control the thickness of the strike-through line?
Assuming that the font in the paragraph style Staff Labels is set to the factory default Academico Regular 10.0pt, if you replace the hyphen in the short instrument name “K.-Fag.” with the Unicode non-breaking hyphen (U+2011), select the first period and change the Letter Spacing to -2.50pt, then you can get this:
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I wouldn’t be worrying about that. It’s not even consistent in the same score (Mahler 9th. Universal Edition)
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@johnkprice thanks a lot! that looks perfect and it’s a much better solution!
@Vadian kudos to you, how did you recognize the source from my small picture? impressive! you’re right that it’s inconsistent, but I imagine this trick can still help save some space in other situations!
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Musical forensics 
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The type face and appearance is doubtless Universal Edition and 5 clarinets and 4 bassoons is most likely a late Mahler symphony. The key signature leads to the 9th. I’m a conductor and fortunately I own the score.
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