Hi Dorico team, thanks for all the wonderful work you’ve been putting in. I’m slowly getting faster at inputting, and editing, but there are still some trip ups. Im sure it won’t be long until I’m as quick as I am on Sibelius.
But a few things concern me.
I have a very specific aesthetic when it comes to my scores, I don’t really adhere to any tradition, and I take what I think looks cool. Nothing to radical but some simple things.
Stem-less note heads. I write a lot of music of improvisatory ambient nature, and I use these a lot.
Here is an example:
Time signature fonts. I absolutely detest the traditional time signatures fonts that have been around for ages (slightly joking hehe), and prefer to use my own choices. As in:
I am wondering when these features will show up? Obviously, they have to come at some time, but is it possible to give me an honest and realistic answer? You don’t need to sell me Dorico, Ive already bought it, and I believe it will be the best, if your attention to your customers needs is as faithful as you seem to make it out to be. But I do need to complete a number of scores in the coming months, and they need my aesthetic to stay the same, so if you don’t see these changes happening anytime soon, then I will stick with Sibelius now, and cease my learning of Dorico until it can stand beside the other two major software rivals.
Manipulation of all fonts can’t be that hard, is it?
Dorico doesn’t yet have proper support for stemless noteheads, but it’s something we plan to add. For now, in certain circumstances you can achieve the appearance of stemless notes by setting the ‘Stem length adjustment’ property to -3.5 in Engrave mode: this will only work for unbeamed notes that don’t show a flag/tail.
Unfortunately changing the font used for time signatures is tricky at present: even if you could change the font used, which is technically possible but for which there is no user interface just yet, the positioning of the new glyphs would not be quite correct, which is something we will need to address in future.
In a handwritten style of my music notation fonts in development, I’ll be using numbers in the style of my 1403 Vintage Mono Pro typeface (that have a closer look to your example). I posted a very early sketch, not adjusted, on twitter.
As Daniel mentioned, vertical positioning adjustment of time signature numerator and denominator isn’t yet supported.
If Dorico ends up supporting user selection of stylistic alternates for time signatures, I’ll consider including them with more classical styles, too, or provide a version with them as default.
It isn’t? I have a project in hand where I was going to quickly sketch up a font based on the manuscript’s handwriting, and I would most likely be doing time signatures as well. Not even if the font is SMULF-compliant (which, I’ll be honest, I haven’t properly dived into yet)?
I can imagine a crazy workaround (emphasis on crazy, for the time being): selecting no denominator, and having both numbers on the glyph. It would quite inflexible and even unavailable to most users… I wonder why is it that time signatures are always so tricky? Do you really have such a hard time dealing with them in the background that you have to lock away certain things or hardcode exceptions, as in previous products? Just curious.