Dorico and music fonts

Dorico
#1

I know it is ridiculously early for this — the team is hard at work prioritizing and working out the bumps — but I’m really looking forward to make Dorico my own.

Regarding music fonts: Engrave > Music Fonts brings up a dialog of SMuFL-compliant fonts. Is this dialog auto-populated somehow, or will we be able to add our own, either through some Sibelius-like system (via Preferences) or through a dedicated installation process?

I went back to a music font of my own, now that Dorico is released. I’m not sure if I’ll make it SMuFL-compliant (I’m not sure I have the design chops), but I’d like to test it and use it on Dorico. Engrave > Font Styles let me change the Default Music Font, but it’s not allowing me to change the noteheads to my font, defaulting back to Bravura as I dismiss the dialog.

As I said, feel free to ignore this as it shouldn’t be a priority at all, but if Dan or one of the team has a few spare minutes, I’d be most obliged.

#2

The dialog is auto-populated, based on finding the appropriate SMuFL metadata JSON file for a given font in a specific location.

Dorico can’t use any non-SMuFL-compliant font at the moment, though the plan is that you will be able to in due course, basically by redefining manually what each important symbol the program uses (every clef, every notehead, every accidental, etc.) should map onto in an arbitrary font. The nice thing about SMuFL is that we can be reasonably sure that the right symbol will be found in the right place, and with the appropriate scaling and registration.

#3

For the time being, I’m remapping my own font by hand. The time is right to finally have a serious look at SMuFL. Thank you for the amazing help, as always.