I’m a long time Finale user and it looks like I will be switching to Dorico Pro…
Obviously I’ve got a lot to learn, but…
Hopefully these jpgs will show. I prefer secondary braces rather than thin line brackets as in the pics, but in Finale the brace covering 4 violin staves looks elegant enough, whereas in Dorico it looks hidious - and overlaps the instrument name. In Finale you can alter the thickness, shape, size, curvature etc of the brace - can you do this in Dorico? Thanks.
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I’m not at the computer right now, but are you sure there’s nothing in engraving options?
Dorico uses four different sizes of brace, and they are all contained within the music font. There are settings in Engraving Options > Brackets and Braces > Advanced Options that control the size at which each size ‘kicks in’.
You may find that different fonts and different size thresholds give you better results.
There’s no direct editing of the shape – short of creating your own font, or importing SVG graphics into the Music Symbols editor.
You may want to increase the indent values in Layout Options.
Thanks. I tried the various options here and it does look better. Guess I would need to try a different font to get the brace to be a little thinner…
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I agree with philipbuckmaster. Dorico appears to resize the brace both vertically and horizontally (i.e. uniformly). In Finale, a regularly spaced piano staff (curly) brace, and one that has to be stretched say, twice as far, for any reason, results in a taller brace with the same horizontal proportions. Actually there is some scaling at the lower extremes but it’s generally handled well. In Dorico the whole thing is stretched in both dimensions. The Finale brace appears to be being acted upon like a Vector object, while the Dorico brace is enlarged like a graphic (yes I know it’s probably a font and therefore has vector points, but Dorico seems to just crudely resize it).
Obviously this is a matter of personal preference, but to my eye, the sudden changes in width in the Dorico brace are brutally obvious. I’d much prefer to see some vector logic being able to be applied here, to preserve horizontal width and offsets in a more controlled manner.
Dorico example shown below. (I’ve experimented with the four settings for small/regular/large/larger brace, but can’t really get a pleasing result that doesn’t result in some sort of obvious leap in size).
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What font are you using?
I’ve tried Bravura and an SVG based on the default Finale curly brace. Do you know if there’s a way to have Dorico redraw the brace vertiically without a symmetrical increase in the width? I’ve also tried forcing it to use just one of the the four sizes by adjusting the space settings for each but can’t seem to kludge it like that.
Dorico doesn’t stretch braces only vertically, so as the distance between staves increases, the overall size of the brace increases proportionally both vertically and horizontally.