I am trying your excellent ‘figurato’ figured-bass font and everything is working well.
Is there a way to add an extension line to each figure in a stack; eg 642 with eack number having an extension line? Using the space bar just adds an extension to the bottom number only.
As I use figured bass extensively, I have been yearning for this feature in Dorico. Until now I used the text feature with good results but now i think I’ll be changing to ‘figurato’. Thank you for all your work in offering your font, this is really excellent.
Thanks a lot, Michael. I’m very glad that the font is working well for you. Out of curiosity: Are you on Windows or on Mac?
Is there a way to add an extension line to each figure in a stack; eg 642 with eack number having an extension line? Using the space bar just adds an extension to the bottom number only.
I’m afraid I don’t have a good solution for this.
You could try to input the different layers in different lines of lyrics, but you might have difficulty in getting the numbers correctly centered above each other and in getting the right vertical distance between the figures.
If you don’t need too many of them you could also use glissando lines to fake the extension lines.
I have given some thought to how I could create extension lines from within the font, but so far I haven’t found a good solution. Any suggestions would be welcome…
As I use figured bass extensively, I have been yearning for this feature in Dorico. Until now I used the text feature with good results but now i think I’ll be changing to ‘figurato’. Thank you for all your work in offering your font, this is really excellent.
Check out the attached zip file - it’s the opening movement from the Vivaldi Gloria (not finished yet). Figured bass.zip (36.4 KB)
As you can see, the baselines need to be adjusted. I can’t use Engraving Options because I have lyrics for the singers as well. Just to let you know that is something I would change.
Thank you, Dan.
You’re absolutely right. The problem arises from the fact that I designed figurato with basso continuo figures above the system in mind. Of course placing them below the system is eaqually, if not more common practice. I’m planning to create a second version where the figures would be vertically aligned at the top and stacked downwards.
Changing the line height would be a possibilty although that would imply a change of the font size in existing documents. I will think about it.
In the meantime you could kind of solve the problem by moving the numbers to the topmost layer that’s present in a system. Type “,” (comma) to skip layers.
Come to think of it, I realized that the huge line height of Figurato was arbitrary and didn’t make sense.
I’ve changed it now. You’ll want to reduce the font size in existing documents to 50% (I recommend 9pt absolute). You should get better results now, Dan.
With the reduced line height this is now possible with lyric extension lines. You need to set the distance between lyric lines to –1/2 to get it right though, so it’s not possible if you have real lyrics elsewhere in the same project. Input the layers in different lines and create the extension lines as usual. Then switch to Engrave Mode and shift the figures to the right until it looks right.
I have also improved the collision avoidance between accidentals a bit. I hope you can make better use of the font now. Thanks for the feedback, guys!
The updated version is here.
Ok, I deleted the old version and re-installed. It looks great! I did end up doing 10-point staff-relative, since my score and parts use a very different rastral size.
I tried the latest version of Figurato on Mac, as Shift-X text items, and it works very nicely. Thanks Florian! One (non-urgent) question though: on Mac, chords do not stack from bottom to top, but top-down, which means that I must type e.g. 642 to obtain a 246 chord. What would happen if I opened a Mac-based project with figured bass on a Windows machine with the same version of Figurato installed? Wouldn’t the figures be shown in the wrong order?
I’m glad that it works for you, Pjotr!
Yes, this has been reported before. I’m afraid I haven’t managed to solve this yet. And yes, when you open a Mac-based project with figurato on Windows the figures are shown in the ‘wrong order’.
Update: the OpenType feature that makes the figures stack bottom-up does work as you intended, if you type figured bass combinations in TextEdit on the Mac. TextEdit apparently is quite Unicode and OpenType-compliant. It’s supposed to handle most of the world’s writing systems, after all. Unfortunately, the Qt framework Dorico is built upon is too limited here, at least the Mac version.
No doubt a related issue: when I add figured bass (shift-X method), it’s almost impossible to re-select an existing FB text item to e.g. correct it, or even to delete or copy it. It looks as if Dorico cannot determine the clickable area where the text object lives. Most of the time, I have to click more or less inside the staff to grab an item that’s clearly way below, which, of course, very often results in selecting the whole bar or the nearest note in the staff. Marquee-dragging works a little better, although I often have to de-select notes that become selected too.
It would definitely be less clever, but I think a figured bass font that simply works top-down, with ordinary returns to go to the next line, would mitigate these issues.
For the current approach to work the glyphs need to have zero width, unfortunately. That’s why you have difficulty selecting them as text objects. I find that it works reasonably well if I click on the lower left corner of a figure or with arrow key navigation. Interestingly the problem doesn’t occur when you input them as lyrics.
For what it’s worth, you can use figurato with normal line breaks as well. (Of course it would have been easier to do it just this way – but I wouldn’t be having so much fun!)
I think I have found a way to solve all the issues without abandoning the automatic positioning. I’ve taken a different approach that I’m currently writing the feature code for. Give me a few days.
Interesting. That makes sense. After all we read everything else top-down too. And come to think of it… when I write figured bass by hand top-down does feel more natural.
Hm! Ben, I think this was an invaluable comment: don’t try to impose what’s (arguably) logically correct if mind and perception work the other way around…
Thanks Florian, for your clarification. Good to know it’s the zero width I’m struggling with. Now I know better where to aim my mouse clicks. Although I’m used to read chords bottom-up (following music theory), I wouldn’t mind at all to enter them top-down, like benwiggy. I’ll finish my current project using the last published version of Figurato, but I am also curious to test the next one.
Dear Peter,
Music theory… is taught differently in different countries. Here in France where I learned my profession, I can tell you those figured bass are read from top to bottom.
What is really interesting with music is that, with the same score, even if we do not read it the same way, we still can play it together and achieve a nice performance
Thanks a lot Florian for Figurato, it works very well for me and is a pleasure to use.
For what I am doing now, I am trying to enter , to skip layers: I need to have the numbers “hanging” instead of stacking. In the image attached I have typed
,6
246
,6
and it seems that the ones starting with , gets a different alignment than the middle one. It works if I type a nonbreaking space before the first comma, but maybe I am doing something wrong and there is a better solution?
Hi Florian.
I’m trying this fantastic figurato font on my mac, and I cannot find the way to have slashed figures — when I input 5/, I get a 5+ figure. I use a french full sized keyboard and high sierra.
I’ll let you know my feelings once I’ve worked on the whole project I’ve just started. But thanks so much !
Hi everybody, my apologies for coming back late to this thread.
There are bad news, unfortunately: I have been in touch with Daniel, and it has turned out that the different positioning results on Mac and Windows are caused by a bug. The bug is not in the Dorico code but in the underlying Qt framework. That means that the Dorico developers can’t fix it. Daniel has forwarded the issue to the Qt developers, but we have no idea wether they’ll fix it anytime soon.
If you are using Figurato on a Mac, please be aware that if you export your score as pdf, the positioning of the figures will be turned upside down in the pdf, and what’s more, this will most likely cause collisions with pretty much every figure that consists of more than one layer.
The reason for this is that – unlike Mac-Dorico itself – the pdf layout engine interprets the positioning code correctly, but of course Dorico has previously positioned the figures according to how its own layout engine renders them. There is nothing I can do about this from inside the font. Sadly, I must therefore discourage all Mac users from using the current version of Figurato. (For what it’s worth: you should be able to use the figures without automatic positioning in text objects with carriage returns.)
I am not willing to abandon this project. To make Figurato usable on Mac with the current version of Dorico I see no other way than using precomposed figures for every possible combination — which is a bit frustrating because that’s exactly what I wanted to avoid. I will add ligatures for the most common figures one by one, but it will take some time. I’ll let you know…
If you would like to support this project, please take a look at the Qt bug report and consider voting for the issue (annoyingly, if you want to vote you need to sign up for a Qt account first). I don’t have high hopes, but perhaps we can speed up things on their side a bit.
Also, if you have a bit of time, take a moment to think about which advanced figured bass combinations you need most, especially which combinations of figures and accidentals, and let me know, so I can prioritize them.
(For what it’s worth: you should be able to use the figures without automatic positioning in text objects with carriage returns.)