I am trying to add a custom playing technique. I have created a glyph as an SVG file. I have added it to my Dorico project, using the “Edit Playing Techniques” dialogue and choosing the SVG as a graphic. I am happy with the way it appears in the score, however, in the playing techniques panel in the right zone, the new playing technique appears as black on a dark background.
I imagine that there is a problem with the SVG code in the graphic, making its colour permanently black rather than modifiable depending on context. I attempted changing the code by hand in a text editor, but I wasn’t able to fix the problem. Specifically, I tried changing
fill=“#000000”
to
fill:param(fill)
I would appreciate some help with this. I’m not even sure if I am asking the right questions.
My first thought is that there must be a font with these glyphs, which might make things easier.
That is a good answer, and I did explore that possibility. But then the fingering and playing techniques will not match the Academico font.
I think MusGlyphs or MusAnalysis might work for this. There are circled numbers, and I used Academico as the basis for it.
I don’t have much experience withe SVG: I guess you could experiment with whatever parameters your graphic design program has at export.
Zapf Dingbats has both ‘white’ and ‘black’ numbered circles, which are not too dissimilar from Academico / NCS.
And it should be mentioned that white and black circled numbers are part of the Unicode spec now, starting at U+24EA (even including circled zero). So many fonts besides Zapf Dingbats may offer them.
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Dorico isn’t clever enough to muck about with the colours of imported SVGs when it draws them in the panel: it simply draws them as it finds them. If you stick with your SVGs, you might find it helpful to switch to the light theme (on the General page of Preferences).
MusGlyphs is a really great tool. Thank you for the suggestion and for creating this font. I’ve decided to stick with what I have though. I prefer the size of the circles I’ve created in comparison with the number.
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Thank you dspreadbury. That’s very helpful of you to let me know.
Thank you to Mark_Johnson, dan_kreider and benwiggy as well. I’m very pleased with all of these helpful suggestions.
I will either work with a font as suggested, or keep it the way it is.
Hi Dan. You seem to be the font guy, so I have a question for you. Sometimes I get piano books of supplemental pieces for students that have a lot of stacked fingering. With Finale and Sibelius I was able to knock out slurs when there were like three numbers stacked. In Dorico, I’ve just been putting a number below the slur and the others above, but I would prefer to knock out the slur.
I created a font with FontSelf in Illustrator using my fingering font and adding a white background to each character. On screen, it looks great, but when I print to PDF—either mono or color—it shows up as black boxes. Is there a setting in Dorico I’m missing? I can use my normal font and add a white background in Dorico, but it doesn’t knock out slurs. I also tried fingering positioned left of notehead then moving them in engrave mode, but those won’t knock out the slurs either. Daniel had mentioned attaching text to the next system with erased background, moving them to the correct bar…he agreed it wasn’t optimal. 
My custom font seems like a good solution if I can get it to show up correctly in a PDF. Thanks!
Yeah I’m afraid there’s not an easy solution at present. @dspreadbury recently told me there seems to be an export mismatch, so the COLR OpenType feature doesn’t export correctly. It is apparently a Qt issue. It’s possible the Qt guys could address it, but I’m not sure it’s imminent.
Sorry. This recently came up for me, here.
Okay. I’ll keep an eye out for any improvements in the future. Thank you for the quick reply!
To follow up, I did find something that seems to work okay. I duplicated the default text paragraph style, made the characters white, and bumped up the size a few points. With this new style I added the music symbol U+E7F4 found in Percussion playing techniques pictograms to knock out the slur. I do this first, then add the fingering with Fingering text paragraph style, which apparently draws in the order it was added. I generated a PDF and it turned out correctly. It’s a bit of a work around, but doable.
