Trying to get a diminished 7th to show up as indicated in the Engraving Options:
I type an “o” (lower case letter “o”) as indicated in the manual:
… but nothing happens. I’ve restarted Dorico, still no luck. (Dorico5, MacOS 13.5.2)
What happens if you type '“dim” instead? (with your setting it should still override to show the “o” circle.)
nope. The popover says “Fdim7,” but when I hit the space bar, it turns into “F7.”
Is it related to the Font style for Chord Symbols (there is a text and a music text font, see manual)
Manual reference:
1 Like
I might be wrong, but I am quite confident that you have to write dim in the chords popover to get a dim or o chord. The appearance of that chord quality is really controlled by the Engraving options>chords as you’ve seen. So yes, I suppose the problem you’re experiencing is at the font level, something is not rightly configured or loaded. Have you restarted your computer after installing or updating? Or are the font styles changed from the factory settingsas @arco suggests (you could check this out thanks to the library manager)?
I agree about the possibility of a font problem. But I rechecked the documentation, which does say you can type o for diminished. I tried o7 for dim. 7th and it worked (in Dorico 4).
@Lillie_Harris, I find it confusing that neither the Chord symbols popover page nor the Popovers PDF specifically mentions a diminished 7th chord, as the 7 is of course interpreted as a different interval with “dim”. In engraving options, “Chord Quality” is for triads only, and all 7th chords are handled under “Intervals”, i.e. tones added to a triad. Currently your “Chord symbol quality” sections include a couple of more complex chords along with triads – but there’s no dim7 anywhere on the page in either source.
1 Like
There are quite a few ways this can happen including a font that doesn’t include the U+E870 glyph, specific chord override, global glyph definition override, etc. We really need to see a file to determine what’s going on here. If you don’t want to post the whole thing, cut the file down to one bar that exhibits this behavior, and upload it so we can take a look.
I stand corrected and I thank you for that! Maybe it wasn’t possible in the first iterations of Dorico and I did not shift my knowledge. Or maybe I was mistaken from the beginning. Now I know ! 
and here is the file:
Lucky Southern (KJ Solo).dorico (798.9 KB)
Feel free to do anything you want to the file. BUT - show me (with screenshots if possible) EXACTLY what you’re doing so I don’t have to struggle with this any more!
Many many thanks to y’all in advance!
Your dim symbol is just blank. I’m not sure why or how you got to this point, but you need to redefine it globally. Select it, then click the Edit Component pencil:
In the Edit Chord Symbol Component window you can now make a global change to the glyph and positioning. Delete the blank glyph and add the correct one. I left your chord symbol Engraving Options percentage settings alone, so I scaled that glyph to 225% in this window.
Hit OK and you’ve made a global change to that glyph that will work for all roots. Do not make further changes in the Project Default Chord Symbol Appearances window or they will only be for that particular root.
Lucky Southern (KJ Solo) - rvsd.dorico (800.3 KB)
2 Likes
Wow. Amazing! Thank you: the screenshots are VERY helpful!
Now … it seems that is happening to other chord symbols—that is, other Xdim7 chords. By default, shouldn’t they all show up with a o? Or do I have to go through each individual chord and create that symbol? I don’t want to reinstall the program since I’ve already saved some templates and preferences.
If you open the file that I uploaded, hit Shift+Q and enter Ebdim7, then it appears correctly. If this isn’t happening in files where you made the edit, then you didn’t make the edit globally the way I described.
1 Like
I just realized why this isn’t working with Finale Jazz. Dorico actually uses different glyphs for chord symbols depending on what you’ve set in Engraving Options / Design / Scale. It uses one glyph for 76% and higher and a different one for 75% and smaller. Since you’ve chosen 65% it’s using the smaller glyph as shown in the editing window by the name csym.DiminishedSmall.dim7:
If I look in the glyphs.xml file, I can see that entry is pointing to the U+F4D8 glyph in the font:
If I look in Finale Jazz, it doesn’t contain a glyph at that location, so it’s just a blank space in your score.
Easy solution is to use a percentage 76% or higher in Engraving Options to trigger the larger dim glyph that Finale Jazz actually has at U+E870. Slightly more involved solution is to redefine it globally the way I described above. Advanced solution would be to redefine what glyph the csymDiminishedSmall.dim7 entry points to using a doricolib file.
1 Like
I’m not sure what I did before, but I just followed your directions for an Ebdim7, hit OK, and then tried it on a Ddim7 and it worked! (Wow! That was easy! NOT.)
And thanks for sending the screenshot of the code, but I’m afraid I draw the line at getting that deep into the weeds with this program.
1 Like
Hi Mark, thanks for the feedback. I want to make sure I’ve understood correctly, and whether or not the answer to the issue that prompted this thread (namely that the expected circle glyph was “simply” missing entirely) sufficiently resolves your point on its own. As in, you can express the various components of chord symbols using any of the equivalent entry terms, but the chord’s ultimate appearance on the page (regardless of any differences in your popover entries) is determined by your default settings.
Qualities will affect any interval, not just 7ths (so yes there’s no “dim7” but there’s also not “Cmaj” etc; the page focuses on giving you the individual building blocks that you can combine together into more complex chord symbols). So I think from that perspective, the table of entries for different qualities is probably fine.
However, there isn’t a row in the “Intervals” table that (for completeness) clarifies that to specify a 7th, you should enter the number “7”, likewise “9” for 9ths etc; I just jumped straight into the two examples of major 7ths and major 9ths.
It’s this point that to me is not clarified by the chosen examples. They start with the 4 triads: Major mentions “or nothing” which implies that we’re only talking about triads. I was trying to check that o7 is a valid input, but the only dim. example reads like it’s just the triad.
In practice the distinction between ° and °7 is subtle. Many musicians are sloppy about exactly which tones that circle indicates (and obviously Dorico can’t be).
It’s a tiny point, so I will stop trying to second-guess what confusion others may have.
Since we’re discussing that page, I also just wanted to mention that although the popover documentation states they are, literally none of these are possible:
Dorico only supports abbreviated modal names so there is no combination of settings or popover syntax that can reproduce those names as shown. (I personally use a doricolib file to redefine these so they are possible.)
Ah, generally this is formatted to convey information rather than reflect a direct match to how the chord symbol appears (because, as should be stated somewhere fairly clearly on that page and you of course are well familiar with, what turns up on the page =/= your popover entry, necessarily).
I could in theory consider adding the abbreviated name to each row, but as the available possibilities multiply significantly for other popover entries, I think that might end up being overly complex.
1 Like