Bravura Question

Daniel,

I would like to use Bravura in an upcoming publication I am beginning work on. Some of the work will include inputting musical text (the numbers for time signatures, accent marks, etc.) into a graphic program (such as Pixelmator), and then manipulate the graphic to highlight the point of discussion (maybe make the accent red, or the make the stave lines very faint and focus on the certain notes, etc.). Right now I am having a tough time trying to work with Bravura and Bravura Text as there is a lot of white space around the characters. There are ways of working around this in Pixelmator, but it is still a little cumbersome to get to the point of making it easy to work with.

I am curious if this was by design? Is this needed to work with Dorico and the SMuFL standard? Or is this just what has come up so far?

Robby

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Bravura has a very tall line height because the ascender/descender values need to be sufficiently large to encompass the entire outline of the tallest character, which in Bravura are the 1024th notes, stem up and down. If the ascender/descender are set any smaller, then the font characters will be clipped on drawing on some operating systems (ahem Windows ahem).

Bravura Text, on the other hand, is designed to have metrics comparable to any other text font, but because it is pulling double duty in terms of both allowing you to type arbitrary musical symbols in text and allow you to write actual melodies in a word processor (by way of ligatures to combine symbols such that they can be moved up and down to different staff positions), many of the symbols look a little small in their default positions in the middle of the em-square.

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Thanks Daniel!! This makes total sense.

Robby

I had this exact same question. Wonderful explanation, Daniel. Another reason why Iā€™m a Dorico (and Mac) user.