Hello everyone, I have two brass fingering items I would like some help with please. The first is how to centre justify the alternate (substitution) fingering on the second line of an entry as in bar 5 of the attached example. At the moment it is right justified. There is a setting in engraving options for fingering, “alignment of fingering substitution relative to note”, which I have set to centre but this does not alter the result.
The second is that the substitute fingering will only allow me to put one number in, whereas brass fingering for a valved instrument can require up to 3 numbers, eg. 1-2-3. In bar 15 I would like the substitute fingering to read (1-3).
Thank you for any help on this.
French Horn Fingering Chart.dorico (682.5 KB)
Hi @TonyGi. Welcome to the Dorico forum.
I had a good look through the various options and properties. At the current stage of development, Dorico is not able to do either of the two things which you have mentioned.
I have devised a workaround using staff-attached text. In a copy of your file, I have added another two staves of notes with all 8 possible fingering combinations, including alternates in parentheses. The separator is included where appropriate.
To enter a fingering on a note, select the appropriate staff-attached text “fingering” and use alt/opt-click to paste it where you want it. To position them relative to the notes and to each other, go into Engrave mode and drag them around until you are happy. You might also like to disable Avoid collisions (only available in Engrave mode) - select the text, open Properties, click the Avoid collisions button but leave the checkbox unchecked.
You should be able to copy and paste between documents, but I have sized the various characters in each fingering to match (as closely as I could) the appearance of the “real” fingerings in this particular file. For reference, if you feel like experimenting, all text was entered using Insert Music Text. The point sizes which I used were: the left and right parentheses are in the Bravura Text font 16 pt with a baseline shift of -1.5 pts, the fingering numbers and separator are in the Sebastian font 7.0 pt for the numbers and 13.0 pt for the separator, the separator had a baseline shift of -1.5 pt applied. The complete entry for each text item [ eg (1•2•3) ] had Letter Spacing of 0.5 pt applied. When selecting all the characters in each text item, the Letter Spacing will probably show some other value because of the mixture of different fonts and point sizes. Also, when I tried recreating this imitation fingering text in a different document, the fonts and sizes were all over the place, so you might want to restrict yourself to copying the text only within your document or a duplicate which has all the same settings.
When using Insert Music text, if you need to find the characters, type its “name” into the Search field. The names, followed here by their UniCode code points are:
fingering0 U+ED10
fingering1 U+ED11
fingering2 U+ED12
fingering3 U+ED13
fingeringSeparatorMiddleDot U+ED2C
fingeringLeftParenthesis U+ED29
fingeringRightParenthesis U+ED28
Once the fingering chart is complete, you can delete the extra two staves - select the 4/4 time signature, press shift-B, in the popover type -16, press delete.
If you need any further assistance, feel free to ask.
Cheers,
Steven.
FrHnFing as text.dorico (719.8 KB)
Hi Steven, thank you so much for your wonderful efforts on these fingering matters.
The use of stave attached text was to be my next option if there was no answer to adjusting the fingering properties and options.
I like all your ideas and will get to these tomorrow, Melbourne time, and I am sure I will end up with a great result. I’m thinking now that I might save your multiple “fingering” text into a Word file so I can copy and paste from that, if that works. Thanks again.
Cheers, Tony