Bravura has a lot of glyphs in its Private Use Range for small optical variants, including small time signatures (U-F45D - U-F466) and small flags (U-F48B - U-F49A).
The references to those glyphs are also present in Dorico’s glyphs.xml
When are they used?
Those are SMuFL stylistic-set/alternate glyphs. SMuFL explicitly lists small optical variants as glyphs “designed for use on smaller staff sizes,” so Bravura includes them for applications that may want to substitute them. However, their presence in Bravura and glyphs.xml doesn’t automatically mean Dorico uses them by default in normal engraving. For more information, refer to the W3C SMuFL specification: sets - Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL)
Therefore, I suspect these are optional infrastructure rather than something you’ll often see explicitly invoked. It would be great to hear from Steinberg about which Dorico contexts, if any, currently use them.
I see. it would be helpful to have some sort of technical guide for Dorico with support documents for font designers. I’m just reluctant to include glyphs that I can’t test in live setting, and especially, in print.
You’ve been really supportive with your answers. I do appreciate the effort.
Thanks — that’s totally understandable. If you’re designing fonts for real-world use, it’s risky to include glyphs that can’t be meaningfully tested in Dorico or checked in print.
My impression is still that these small flags and time signatures are part of the broader SMuFL alternate-glyph infrastructure rather than something Dorico obviously exposes in everyday engraving, but it would really help to have Steinberg confirm that explicitly.
An official technical guide for font designers would be hugely useful: which glyphs Dorico actively uses, which are optional, and which engraving situations trigger them. That would remove a lot of guesswork.
Amen!