Adding a new Line Body changes the whole score's font back to Bravura

Dorico
#1

With your score set to any music font other than Bravura (Petaluma, November 2.0, etc.), adding a new repeatable line body seems to reset the score’s font back to Bravura.

(This assumes a score using any non-Bravura music font.)

  1. In Engrave mode, go to the Line Bodies panel, either directly from the Engrave menu or from within the Lines panel.
  2. Add a new Repeatable line type. Add any shape to the line.
  3. Close the panel.

Presto-chango, your score is reset to Bravura! Super alarming and (I hope we all agree) not at all the desired behavior. The only Undo command is “Undo Update Score Library,” which obviously deletes the custom line body I just created…


In this video, my test file starts out in a non-Bravura font (you can see by noting the shape of the flats at the beginning vs. the end when they are back to Bravura.


FontChanging-small.gif

#2

Yes, this will happen. The reason for this is that when you first add a new line style to your project, Dorico has to add the various required symbols to your project, which it does by importing them from its factory library, which uses Bravura. Because those symbols themselves depend on font styles, those font styles are imported from the factory library too, with the result that if the font currently in use for that font style differs from the default, it will be reset to Bravura. This is obviously not ideal, but it’s a bit of a tricky one: the only way we can be sure that you’ll get the symbols you have chosen is to ensure the right font style is chosen. Provided the font you’re using yourself contains all those symbols, you can of course go back and change the ‘Default music font’ font style back to your custom font.

#3

Thanks for the reply. The confusing part is that the Line Body panel is showing me the symbols in my own font – not in Bravura. So in fact, I’m not interested in whatever symbol is in Bravura, I’m expecting the symbol in my font to be used in my score. I guess it doesn’t matter if internally the program needs to “think” I want a Bravura glyph, but it seems odd.

Regardless, if I change the Default music font back, can I be relatively sure that nothing else in the file is going to change? You can imagine when this happens on a heavily tweaked and nearly-finished score, it’s really alarming. Without paging through and checking every dotted i, I’m terrified some very fiddly manual adjustments are going to end up screwy.

Not to be obtuse, but I’m guessing there’s a reason couldn’t Dorico see whatever font you had set as default before this necessary operation, and restore your setting after it’s done?

#4

Yes, you can in fact simply go to Engrave > Font Styles and just change the ‘Default music font’ font style back to your chosen font, and have confidence that nothing else will change.

#5

I am experimenting with the awesome LS Iris font, which unfortunately (and understandably) doesn’t have all the lines I need, so I wanted to borrow from bravura.
Sadly, Dorico switches back to Bravura for the whole score when trying to edit the symbols quite randomly.
Here you can see me opening the symbols editors, and closing them just by pressing enter. At the third (often it is the second) time, the editor already opens with the symbol, and when pressing enter, all the symbols appear and Dorico changed to bravura.

I assume it’s the same issue, although I don’t quite understand it, tbh.

#6

Yes, this sounds like exactly the same problem. The solution is what Daniel said: Go to Engrave > Font Styles and change the “Default music font” font style back to your chosen font.

I agree that it’s weird that we have to remember to do this each time we edit some of the symbols/line bodies/whatever, and it’s super alarming. I hope that in future versions of Dorico it will do this task for us, but :man_shrugging:. At least we have a solution.

#7

If I do that, I am where I was before, and trying to change the lines in the symbol editor results in the same problem…

#8

Daniel probably has to weigh in here, but I don’t understand why you are opening and closing the Symbol editor without doing anything. I would accomplish this with this series of actions (I just tried with the November2 music font and it worked fine.)

Line Bodies →
Click on the Edit pencil icon to open the symbols editor.
Create a new symbol.
Find the symbol you want in the Bravura font (or whatever font).
Click OK twice to close the symbols editor and get back to the Line Bodies panel.
Find your new symbol (the one you just created) in the panel, and add it to your line. Construct your line.
Click OK to close the Line Bodies panel. Dorico will (I think always) change the music font back to Bravura.
Now go to Engrave → Font Styles → Default Music Font and change it back to your chosen font.
Click OK. The rest of your score should change back to your music font, but your line should still contain the symbol you created from a different font.

I believe that by opening and closing the Symbols panel, Dorico is changing the whole score back to Bravura, and then you’re choosing a (default) symbol in the default font (Bravura) which changes when you change the score’s Default Music Font back to Iris or whatver. You need to create a new symbol explicitly using Bravura. Don’t open and close the Symobls panel without doing anything.

These workflows are a huge pain and not particularly intuitive, but I do think it’s possible to do what you’re asking.

#9

I didn’t do anything else to show the basic concept of the bug.
This also happened to me when editing symbols before.
Actually you can see the moment it’s happening when the symbol appears in the symbol editor, instead of being empty.
Of course the symbols I edited remain when changing back to LS Iris, but I had to change the music font several times back, Bc it Switched to bravura.

#10

It’s not a bug, as I explained to Jeffrey before, but it is obviously unexpected and unhelpful. I can’t add much more beyond the explanation I have previously given. When you confirm an edit in one of those dialogs, Dorico has to add a number of library items from the factory library into the library in your project, and that includes dependencies: not only, say, a specific symbol from a font, but also the font style referenced by that symbol.

#11

Thanks for weighing in Daniel.
So if I understand correctly: me trying to use a Bravura symbol with LS Iris results in Dorico loading the whole font afterwards, meaning I need to switch back to LS Iris before editing the next symbol?

#12

Not that it loads the whole font, but rather that many (or most) of the symbols in e.g. the Music Symbols editor or in the Line Bodies editor depend on the Default music font font style, so when one of those items gets added to your library, all of the dependencies of that item will also be added from the factory library, and of course in the factory library, the Default music font font style is set to Bravura.

#13

I understand. Thanks for explaining it to me, I really appreciate it!