One of my few frustrations with Dorico is access to the glyphs available in SMuFL. From the simple act of adding a flat to text, to swapping the default double-stroke breve for its single-stroke alternate, I find these tasks really time-consuming. The addition of the right-click Music Symbols option in DP 3 was a start, but I feel this could go much, much further.
I propose a pop-up panel which grants access to the whole SMuFL standard; perhaps the “top 30” could headline this panel (accidentals, numerals, common noteheads, etc) and then access by category could follow?
In any case, if we’re going to embrace the crazy bounty of SMuFL (AND I DO) I’d like to see Dorico improve on its accessibility. Thanks!
There are of course utilities for displaying, selecting and pasting the full range of Unicode glyphs in fonts, (such as PopChar for both platforms), so it need not be a frustration as it is.
The advantage of a system-wide utility is that it can be used with other apps (e.g. adding Bravura Text glyphs to a Word document), and with other fonts.
However, you can also copy and paste the glyph symbols directly from the SMuFL website: they’re not GIFs!
I agree that the drop-down list of SMuFL categories in the Symbol Editors needs to be more helpful: e.g. “Common Accidentals” and “Standard Ornaments” are filed alphabetically under C and S…
Was not aware of that PopChar utility, benwiggy. You may not have time, but I’d love any user who cares to comment to send me a PM. I am going to download the trial version.
I’ve just installed the trial version of PopChar (Windows), and I’m curious if it’s really usable with fonts like Bravura - when grouping by “Unicode blocks”, all the glyphs (>3000 of them) are in a single “user defined” block, and even when zoomed to maximum, they are hardly visible (on a full HD monitor, no 4K). Interestingly, entering German terms like “Note” or “Pause” filters to a reasonable subset whereas English terms aren’t found - is Bravura localised?
This is precisely the problem with relying on a third-party app like PopChar (as wonderful as it is, it’s not SMuFL-smart). Dorico is, of course, and it seems to me that it’s far better for the end-user to have this capability in-app.