I’m trying out Dorico after a lifetime of Finale and I’ve already banged my head in like 20 seconds over the font selction.
Finale offers a tremendous amount of control over the fonts in a document. I’ve attached a shot of the dialog box. In your scores you can actually use completely different fonts for the notehead, flags, rests, accidentals, etc. in your score essentially “creating” a look for your scores that’s impossible to achieve with just one font.
This is something I’ve taken advantage of for a long time in Finale and is an essential part of the look of the scores and orchestrations that I do for people and has been tweaked over time to make scores that are extremely readable.
I can’t seem to find how to assign different fonts to the actual musical elements - for example, one music font for the notes, a different one for the rests, a different one for the accidentals.
Adding on to what Ben said above, default accidentals are a bit trickier to find, as they are in the Tonality Systems panel. You’ll need to click Edit Tonality System (the pencil under where it says Equal temperment in the pic below).
But in general you will find that the glyphs in Bravura (and most SMuFL fonts) harmonize with each other very well, and this is accomplished within one font. If you have various particular glyphs you like or want to emulate, a better approach would be to design (or commission) your own SMuFL font that contains all of them!
(Don’t copy glyphs wholesale from commercial fonts to reuse for commercial purposes, of course. You can start from Bravura, as it is free and open-source.)
I’ll put in another vote for Sebastian again, which I’ve used on several projects with great success. I don’t know how to describe the look of it, except that it’s just the perfect fit for certain projects.
The problem is I want to see if I can get Dorico to output anywhere near what I was getting from Finale. If I can get it to even within 80% of Finale’s output, I’d be a little more optimistic and willing to put the time and massive amount of stress in, to learn it. If I can’t even get close to the output I was getting from Finale, then I want to know now and I’ll just stick with Finale and keep my fingers crossed for the future.
So while I should be focusing on basic functions before I start picking fonts, I don’t want to put the time in to learn the basic functions if I can’t even get Dorico to come close to the font capabilities of Finale.
Thanks for the help, though. I’ve been too busy with music work with deadlines to really mess with Dorico yet, so I’m going to try to tackle the font thing next week.
Given that you are apparently talking about a really high level of customisation, it would probably help if we could see some samples of what you do in your scores, instead of talking about the problem in the abstract.
