I’ve been moving Finale workflows into Dorico and one of my biggest stumbling blocks are chords. I’ve read all of the threads on the chord tool and its many shortcomings regarding suffix libraries but none address my focus, which is on the accidental font and the morphing of suffixes.
Accidentals in chords - I’m trying to maintain consistency with the appearance of our extensive catalog of old Finale files that use the Maestro font and am making template files. Currently, I’ve found that Bravura Text is the only option available for accidentals in the “Chord Symbols Music Text Font” that work seamlessly. You can switch the font to Finale Maestro Text but the accidental symbols do not show up. The one time I was able to get Dorico to show the right symbols, the slash was gone (this slash is a problem I didn’t even think about until moving to Dorico). This means that if I want the accidentals to match Maestro, I must manually recreate every conceivable chord and its suffixes, as there isn’t a way to globally adjust accidentals in the chord tool through Engraving Options or Font Styles. Is this correct? Is there a place to switch out the accidentals in a chord tool similar to Notehead Sets?
Because the Chord tool does not allow for mixed Standard and Solfége chords, along with Capos, I created a font to try to match what happens in the chord tool. What I am discovering is that the suffixes are being “morphed” and are not true to the size of the font. They are closer together, an “m” is bigger and fatter than the normal sized font. Any logic to understand what’s going on so I can make smart decisions about my font?
Thank you. Steve
Have you made any progress with this? I also use Finale Maestro, but when I set the “Chord Symbols Music Text Font” to Finale Maestro, I some other flat and sharp that does not match. I don’t know where those characters are coming from.
Finale Maestro Text isn’t really a “proper” SMuFL font – it is not as Bravura Text is to Bravura, for example. It only contains a handful of SMuFL symbols, and it doesn’t include the characters Dorico expects to find for chord symbol accidentals, which should be in the range U+ED60–U+ED6F.
However, you should be able to coax Dorico into using the accidentals that are present in Finale Maestro Text, though it’ll take a few steps.
First, don’t change the Chord symbol music text font font style: leave that set to Bravura Text. (If you set it to Finale Maestro Text, you won’t be able to see any of the symbols in order to change them, because they’re all missing from that font.)
Go to Library > Chord Symbols.
In the box at the top left, type e.g. C# and click the + button to add the chord symbol to the list on the left, and you’ll see it appear on the right.
Select the sharp accidental in the preview on the right.
Notice that in the row of components below the preview, one of the two sharp accidentals (the first is for full size accidentals, the second is used at smaller sizes and is an optical variant) is highlighted: click the pencil icon below the row of components to edit this component.
In the editor that appears, choose Standard accidentals (12-EDO) from the list of SMuFL ranges, then choose Finale Maestro Text from the Font drop-down.
Now add the sharp accidental by selecting it on the right and clicking Add Glyph.
You’ll see that the Maestro sharp is much larger than the existing Bravura Text one: set Scale to 50% for both X and Y. (You might also want to adjust the Offset Y value, if you like the alignment of the Bravura Text sharp.)
Now select the original Bravura Text sharp and click the delete button, leaving only the Maestro sharp behind.
Click OK to confirm your changes.
That’s the basic procedure: now, whenever that specific sharp component is used, it’ll be the Maestro one that is used in that project, in all chord symbols. You should repeat this procedure for the smaller optical variant sharp as well (match its visual size by applying a smaller scale factor).
Repeat this for flats, and for the circle/slashed circle/triangle used in your chord symbols (though these latter symbols do not appear to be in Finale Maestro Text at all, so you’ll need to use Finale Maestro here, and you’ll need to be careful with the scaling of these symbols as a consequence).
You cannot currently, as things stand in Dorico 5, override the accidentals that are part of alterations like b9 or #11. These components are indivisible at present. However, in future versions of Dorico, it will be possible to adjust the accidentals independently from the scale degrees using the method described above.
For mixing solfège and standard roots, I think the better approach would be for Dorico to allow you to override the root appearance for a selected chord symbol via the Properties panel. I’m not sure what is really involved in making this happen, but I have added it to our backlog, and we’ll look into it for the future.
Yes, I have made progress. Basically I made my own font specifically for the chord font settings including those characters in the right location so they work without fuss. I can easily change sizing or alignment within the font to give me the results I expect. Please note this issue is with all of the Finale Text fonts like Ash, Jazz, etc… As Daniel pointed out, alterations are a challenge and I will be making an individual library in Dorico for those as they come up.
That’s very odd! That suggests that the glyph that’s been added is either in the wrong font, or isn’t the glyph selected on the right-hand side. Try deleting it and adding it again.
Unfortunately I can’t offer any explanation for what might be happening there! The symbols in the font are clearly appearing fine in general, as they’re shown in the panel on the right.
Here’s the file you can use if your team wants to troubleshoot (although I’d hate to have made an embarrassing mistake a while back that caused all this!)
I am using this file for the express purpose of tweaking our chord library - it’s clearly a bit of a mess right now
The font is a mess. The odd symbols being used for E260 – and ED62 and ED60 don’t exist. This is some of what I cleaned up in my font created. Attached is the what the FinaleMaestro Text font looks like currently.
Steve is talking about Finale Maestro Text itself – the font is a bit of a hodgepodge of different things.
Can you try my procedure in a brand new project, and see whether it works OK? I suspect some setting in your template is queering the pitch somehow, though off the top of my head I can’t think what it might be.
Incidentally, everyone who was watching this thread, I posted a file for Daniel S. to analyze, then removed it. I would respectfully ask you do so too if you happened to download it for a peek at what was going on. Thanks!
Now I’m using Version 6.0.10.6032 (May 26 2025) with macOS14 and have similar questions.
[Q1]
I’d like to apply my change to all roots by using D6’s new function, but if I change the sharp and flat’s font to Finale Maestro by taking the 10 steps you suggested, I need to make two appearances for sharp and for flat (in green). Plus, it seems I still need to create 7 appearances for each CDEFGAB roots, when these roots have no accidental (in orange). Is this what I still need to with D6 if I want to use Finale Maestro sharp and flat?
[Q2]
I was wondering why sharps and flats look different from the original Finale Maestro symbols when I choose Finale Maestro as a Chord Symbol Music Text Font. It says “U+F4DE” but it doesn’t exist on the SMuFL website. It seems they are not Finale Maestro, even nor Bravura… do you know where these sharps and flats came from? (Maybe this question should go to MakeMusic, though.)
[Q3]
Thanks for the following suggestion, this is very good to know.
This means you cannot use Finale Maestro for tension’s sharps and flats at this point (D6.0.10), because these #9 or b13 cannot be edited and there is no way to replace symbols with Finale Maestro ones by using the method described above. Am I understanding it correctly? Please let me know, thank you.
Finale Maestro Text doesn’t include any of the accidental characters that Dorico expects to find in a SMuFL-compliant font that is suitable for use by the Chord Symbols Music Text Font font style. I would suggest you leave that set to Bravura Text, and instead substitute individual symbols from Finale Maestro Text where necessary.
If you set the font style to use Finale Maestro Text, you will typically see fallback symbols, because the chosen font doesn’t contain the necessary symbols. It does contain the first six characters from the Chord symbols range, but none of the parentheses or the altered bass slashes. It doesn’t contain any of the symbols from the Standard accidentals for chord symbols range. So when Dorico constructs a chord symbol and it wants to use any of these symbols, you will instead see a substitute from another font.
As a result, I recommend you specify Bravura Text as the font for Chord Symbols Music Text Font, so that at least by default you will see a symbol from a known font.
To replace the standard flat and sharp accidentals, you can do this via Library > Chord Symbols using the method I described earlier in this thread. Once you’ve replaced the standard Bravura Text sharp and flat with the ones from Finale Maestro Text (though the flat in particular in Finale Maestro Text is one of the ugliest things I’ve ever seen, and I’m really not sure why you would want to use it for anything!), you can select the chord symbols you had to create in the dialog in order to edit the accidentals and click the “revert to factory” button to remove them from the dialog.
You shouldn’t need to edit the actual roots at all: simply editing the Chord Symbols Font font style to use Arial (or Helvetica, whichever you’re using) should be sufficient. After editing the sharp and flat accidentals in Library > Chord Symbols, all roots will use the Finale Maestro symbols from that point.
Editing the accidental symbols in an alteration like b9 or #11 is still awkward via the existing editor. For the time being, you will need to edit b5, b9, #11, etc. one at a time. But the data is structured in such a way that it is possible to replace the accidentals in those components, as this is what enables you to edit the kerning between the accidental and each number; what remains to be done is to make it possible to select the accidental and the interval individually in Library > Chord Symbols.
This is where Dorico expects to find the glyph csymAccidentalSharpSmall. If you open up the glyphs.xml file, you can see the codePoints where Dorico is looking for these elements:
Dorico uses the “small” variants for 75% and lower and the standard variant for 76% and up. If your font is missing the “small” variant, you can try setting Engraving Options / Chord Symbols / Design / Scale factor to 76% and see if that invokes the correct glyphs.
