Brand new Dorico user here - had been a Sibelius user for 15+ years and just recently jumped ship. I’m still re-wiring my brain, but overall I’m really liking Dorico. It’s making me more productive, even while I’m still learning the program.
I’ve come across a question that I know couldn’t be done easily in a Sibelius workflow (which for what I’m asking about also included Illustrator and Powerpoint). I’m wondering if I either can or someday will be able to do in Dorico: I’d like the ability to define colours for every element on the page: not only noteheads and lyrics, but time signatures, key signatures, staff lines, etc. Everything.
The use case for this is that I often create slides for projecting lyrics on a screen. I use a melody line along with the lyrics to guide people musically. And it works really well - even non-musicians can get a sense of pitches moving up and down, or longer or shorter notes. (And, one of the reasons I’m switching to Dorico is the ability to define 4:3 layouts and 16:9 layouts in one file and “print” them both to graphics because I need to work in both aspect ratios…for me this is a killer feature).
What I’d like to do, as a unique feature of what I do, is visually emphasize the lyrics with the rest of the elements on the page/screen defined to be a medium grey. That way the musical elements are still there to guide people, but the visual focus is on the lyrics.
Is there a way to define a colour for every single element in a Flow? It seems like not, but maybe I’ve just missed it in my searching. If not currently available, is it in the pipeline and/or can I make it a feature request? I know I can do it in Illustrator after exporting, but the amount of work that is doesn’t make it worth it for me currently. If it could be done natively in Dorico, then my workflow would be streamlined even more.
Welcome the forum, Michael. Although you can’t define default colours for different types of items such that they’re always rendered in a particular colour, for most items in the score you can filter for them, or select them using Edit > Select More, and then override their colour using the ‘Color’ property in the Common group of the Properties panel.
Hi there, I want to colour a time signature (it’s for a worksheet), and have selected it in Engrave mode and applied a colour in the properties panel, but that doesn’t seem to work, only noteheads? I’ve tried doing a print preview and ensuring colour is selected, not mono. Here’s a screenshot, when I click away the 4/4 will still appear in black:
Just to chime in on this, it would be amazing to have every element be able to have an assigned colour. For example, I produce song lyrics with a melody line to be displayed on a 1080p screen. I would love to be able to visually emphasize the lyrics by keeping them black and making everything else on the screen a little bit lighter, like a med-dark grey. That would include time signatures, key signatures, staff lines, clefs, etc., as well as everything related to notes: heads, stems, slurs, ties, etc.
So I guess this could be considered a feature request.
I was looking at exactly this the other day!! It seems that color change is currently possible by manually editing color in “Edit Music Symbol” for the given symbol in the given music font.
Here I changed the “3” in the time signature to hex value #434343 from the default 0’s:
But I haven’t found a way to do this for staff lines, which was my original intent. And it’s a lot of symbols!
Thanks for that - it’s a step in the right direction, for sure, and maybe something to build on. If it could be made more user friendly and include every element, I’d be all over it.
I agree. Perhaps there’s 3rd party font editing software that allows changing color of all symbols in a bulk operation but I’m not knowledgeable enough about these things. If anyone can shed some light on this, it would be much appreciated. It looks as though some symbols (like staff lines), can only be re-colored this way.
No need to edit fonts, but if you export a PDF from Dorico, you should be able to edit the colour of any item in a vector drawing package, like Adobe Illustrator, Affinity Designer, Inkscape, etc.
Yes, this is certainly possible, but the COLR property is OpenType, and I’ve found it a bit fiddly. Dorico supports it, but many other programs don’t. (I guess Dorico is the one you’re asking about)
I’ve done this in FontCreator. I love that program and have found it easy to use.
It is 2023, and it seems like there is not yet any official way to tag colour to any element. So, I am trying to assign colours outside Dorico, using GlyphsApp for Mac. Still, can’t figure it out.
Does anyone know how to actually do this, step-by-step, without messing around with post-processing design packages (Adobe Suite) as benwiggy suggests above?
What exactly are you trying to achieve? A font editor is at least as much ‘messing around’ as using a drawing app, if not more so.
You can create a Notehead set, with a colour definition, and then assign that set to notes.
You can set the colour of a glyph in the Music Symbols editor.
Paragraph Styles can set the Foreground Colour.
You can also set the Colour property for many elements (but not all, admittedly).
However, some things, like staff lines, are not font glyphs, so you will need to edit the PDF in a drawing app – which is usually as simple as selecting them and clicking on a colour picker.
Hello benwiggy and thanks for your fast response! I am seeking a universal, as to say, way to apply colour to certain elements, embedded inside the font.
I am aware of the music symbols editor, but I couldn’t find, for example, some other* symbols… Regarding the staff lines*: I am even questioning whether they are not actually glyphs, because when I opened bravura inside GlyphsApp, I checked a symbol tagged uniE01A which is 5 parallel lines.
I would like to take a moment and thank you for you feedback on this forum regarding SMuFL fonts and congratulations for making your font into Dorico 5! You have been a great helper
Yes, staff lines are lines, drawn by the program, not glyphs. Any other symbols?
Playing Techniques can also be set with colours.
I’d recommend changing the colour in Dorico where possible, as editing a font and exporting it is a destructive change; and if (when) there’s a new version of the font in an update, you’ll have to recreate all your work, or keep using your old version.
I will probably dive into Dorico library workspace then. One more question now that I have found an expert: Is there any way to apply the same color to a category of music symbols, let’s say: arpeggios, in one go?
Select your music and right-click>filter>arpeggio signs you can then use the lower properties panel to change the colour of all selected items (in this case arpeggios)
