Cantorum (formerly MusChant) is a font that allows the user to easily input plainchant rotation into Dorico using simple combinations of letters and numbers. It’s available for purchase at Notation Central, here: Cantorum - Notation Central
Feedback is very welcome. I do plan to update Cantorum as requested.
Bravo.
Jesper
Felicitations, @dan_kreider, and great work!
there’s a typo in the description on the NC website- “…rotation…”
ruh-roh!
Thanks, it’s fixed.
Pure genius, Dan!
Joyously purchased. I cannot wait to play around with this tomorrow.
Great achievement, @dan_kreider, and nice tutorial vid. I hope sales are through the vaulted ceiling!
Alright, Dan, I’ve been experimenting.
One thing I’m having trouble figuring out is proper scaling. In your demo file, you show organ and chant side-by-side, but I’m finding the organ part too big.
If I scale everything down via layout options, then the chant gets too small… but if I right click the organ part and do a manual scaling, then my stave lines become to whispy.
I think there has to be a way to strike a balance, and I suspect that there is something very obvious that I’m just missing for some reason. Any thoughts?
This just doesn’t look right to me, but it’s the best I’ve concocted so far:
Edit: I’ve also noticed that if I open the PDF in affinity publisher to edit some of these things directly, it doesn’t interpret the font glyphs correctly, and I end up with a bunch of brackets, although I suspect this is an AP issue more than anything.
Yes, in order to get a proper balance between the plainchant and the standard notation, you need to select a staff size that works for the normal notation, then scale down the staff size of your chant notation using (I think) Edit>Notation>Staff Size. I suppose I should add that to the documentation. I had resisted making it a “how to do this in Dorico” manual, but there’s no reason to hide any necessary functionality from the user.
And yes, I don’t think AP properly recognizes some of these OpenType features. I think InDesign does.
Here’s another issue I’m running into:
puncta cavum that are white in Dorico (and correctly exported using “color”) but then are not being rendered hollow in other programs, most notably, adobe acrobat.
Dorico:
Adobe:
Really? Even the PDF doesn’t display correctly? Oof. That doesn’t make sense…Acrobat should display colors correctly. Maybe @dspreadbury has an idea of why?
Actually, I just tried this again, and even Preview doesn’t display it correctly. You can even see in the upper right that I exported it correctly.
OK, thanks. Sorry about that. I will work on a fix for it.
I 'm afraid I’m utterly unable to get it to work. For some reason, Dorico gives the impression that it will recognize the COLR property, but it’s failing to preview or export it properly. During testing, I had seen that it appeared to work in Dorico, so I didn’t think to actually test an exported PDF.
The font is entirely correct in its construction of the color glyph, as far as I have been able to tell. It works as expected in Word, for example (this is a PDF export):
I thought about a workaround of a playing technique that could be placed directly on the staff, so I tried creating custom playing techniques that were colored, but that path is a dead end. For some reason, they appear in the score as black, no matter what color I choose. I will start a separate thread for this, which feels like a bug to me.
The only solution I have been able to come up with is to create an actual text item, color it white, and drag it into place on top of the regular punctum. That works but is annoying. I’ll continue to refine a way to solve this.
EDIT: that doesn’t work because of this.
(appologies if I am not following this thread correctly)
Have you tried to create a color font in FC? You could fill that symbol in white color 
and use it directly in any app, see below:
https://www.high-logic.com/font-editor/fontcreator/tutorials/create-opentype-color-fonts
That’s exactly what I did. That’s why it displays correctly in Dorico itself. It’s just not respecting that color property on export.
hmm… I see…Too bad. 
Hi there Dan,
This is great just a few questions.
Is there a particular plainsong manual you would recommend for translating rhythmic values to modern notation? - in the past I have used such charts if I ever needed to construct plainsong notation.
Are the symbols used conforming to what I would see in the Liber Usualis for example ( sometimes referred to as square notation (although I may be wrong on that)?
Is there any rough playback of the font in Dorico? - probably the answer to this is no.
I think you may have said elsewhere that coloured notation is possible?
Many many thanks if you have time to answer.
