Bug: Rendering Font Stretch and Spacing

Dorico
1

Hello,

At certain zoom levels beneath 400%, the main editing pane sometimes has trouble accurately rendering type objects that have extreme stretching or increased letter-spacing. Using Academico and writing English, the first attached picture shows the right side of each letter being truncated.

right-edges-truncated.png
right-edges-truncated.png1280×184 27.6 KB

This rendering issue persists up until I print to PDF. In a PDF, there is no truncation issue.

At 400%, the editing pane does not have this behavior, and shows each letter’s glyph in its entirety. When the score is rendered in PDF, however, stretch and spacing appear quite differently.

In Dorico at 400%:

as-shown-in-dorico-400%.png
as-shown-in-dorico-400%.png988×992 21.7 KB

In the rendered PDF:
as-shown-in-PDF.png
as-shown-in-PDF.png1014×1046 32.1 KB

This is Dorico 2.2.10 running on MacOS 10.13.4. Any guidance is much appreciated.

Thank you,
MC

2

Welcome to the forum, MC, and sorry to leave you waiting for a reply for several days.

The problem with the letter spacing and stretch not being correctly reproduced in the PDF is due to one or more bugs in the underlying Qt framework upon which Dorico relies. We have reported this problem to their developers and hope that it will be resolved in future. If they are unwilling to fix it then we also have the option of making fixes ourselves, though obviously we prefer to be working on the functionality of our application rather than fixing bugs in the framework we’re using.

The problem you are seeing in the editor when changing the stretch factor is also a bug in Qt itself. This, at least, is a purely cosmetic problem and once you close the editor you should see the text appears correctly with no truncation.

However, because of the problems with printing and exporting to PDF when stretching fonts, I would encourage you to try to find fonts whose existing standard weights give you the condensed or expanded look you require, as those will always work more reliably.

3

Thanks Daniel – bugs in underlying libraries are a very frustrating thing, especially when they linger. I’ll be on the hunt for other typefaces that suit a little better out of the box.

MC

4

“A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep.” – Frederic Goudy. :laughing: