I have a rather niche question regarding the handling of SMuFL fonts in Dorico. Even when setting the music font to my custom SMuFL font, Bravura’s glyphs are still used for Clef (small) symbols.
The font has uniE050.ss01 in U+F472, as well as Bravura.
Is this a specification of Dorico, or is there an error with the font?
Dorico doesn’t really support stylistic alternates, and falls back to Bravura for those glyphs. (OpenType features in text were only introduced recently.) So the “Larger” Notehead set, Clef changes, and various other things don’t work for other fonts.
Some elements are supported, like staff braces, for which Dorico simply uses the same “off-standard” glyph slots that Bravura does, e.g. F400 to F403.
Your options for the clef glyphs are: either replace the glyphs in the Music Symbol editor with the ones from your font; or increase the size of the clefs (in Engraving Options > Clefs) to 19/25ths, which is the smallest size at which Dorico will use the “real” clefs, not the optically small ones.
Magically, Abraham Lee did manage to get his MTF-Cadence font to support alternates in Dorico, through something he did in his JSON file – but after loads of experimentation, I’ve been unable to isolate it.
I haven’t checked whether the recent revision of the MTF Cadence font works in this way, or not.
I’ve definitely seen a problem like this in Dorico, even the most recent version. If I already have a project typeset in Bravura and I switch to, say, Leland, the small clefs remain in Bravura. I haven’t checked what happens if I use Leland from the outset, but I can imagine that Bravura will be retained for small clefs then, too.
I’d say that this simply represents a bug in how Dorico handles fonts and that it ought to be fixed in a new version, although it’s not an easy-to-spot bug, obviously. Based on what @benwiggy said above, the fix might not need to involve much.
Thank you. The MTF-Cadence case is rather curious. I shall look into it.
