Just putting a plug out there for the Dorico developers to fix some bugs in the way Dorico displays capo chords.
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Dorico adds a really awkward extra space between the italicized chord letter and the chord symbol, for instance the “B” and “m” of “Bm.” It’s totally different than spacing in the actual-pitch chord below which looks cheesy and bad. Before anyone says this is font-dependent, Finale did not make this error with the font I use (Carter Sans).
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Dorico adds vertical space between the rows of capo and actual chords if the slash in - for instance - D/F# extends below the base of the chord letter. Dorico takes it’s cue from the bottom of the slash when calculating spacing distance, not from the bottom of the chord letter and so raises the whole line of capo cords. It throws off the rhythm and aesthetics of the page in my opinion. Finale did not do this.
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Dorico doesn’t allow tweaking of the spacing between the chord letter and chord symbol in the engraving/layout settings. For goodness sakes, why (?) when almost everything else is editable? Dorico smashes the letter and symbol together way too tightly in the project font I use (Carter Sans). Yes, I can make a manual change library for every chord in the lexicon, but that just seems a little ridiculous when this could easily be a tweak in the engraving settings.
Thanks for considering these improvements! I sure love a lot about Dorico over Finale, but these and a couple other things are some areas for improvement in my opinion.
Joey
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Attempted to edit the font I use for chord symbols to shorten the slash so it wouldn’t extend above / below the chord letter. Didn’t fix the problem. Appears that Dorico uses a Bravura Text symbol (assuming its “uniE549”) for the slash. I think it’s kinda poor aesthetic design to have that slash extend above / below the letter AND have Dorico cue the chord row spacing from it. How about have Dorico calculate spacing from the user’s Chord Letter? Not only does the spacing cue from the Bravura slash, but the capo parenthesis actually seem to auto-resize to extend to the upper and lower top of that interior slash. Just for that chord, while all the others in the row (chords without slashes) have different size parenthesis. I look at my scores pretty artistically, and I’ve gotta say, this turns me green.
Aesthetics of chord symbols is really important to me too. I did find some things that help, including some recent changes the team has made.
Here are my settings:
Make sure to uncheck that box at the bottom.
For the record, I don’t use italics with chord symbols. The flat and sharp glyphs just don’t look good with it!!
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That looks really great! What font are you using for the chord symbols? I dig. I also like the shape of your parenthesis (and the wider spacing). Beautiful. Does Dorico stretch the row spacing for you with those slashes?
The font is Trinite, so probably not worth looking at. But I’ve had really good success with Minion Pro and Crimson Pro as well. I don’t typically have a problem with horizontal spacing, since I’m not doing lots of changes (or complex chord symbols).
Any font with oldstyle figures is going to give you a great-looking 7. After using it, I won’t go back to lining figures. At least for the 7.
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Ok, I’ve been working on this for a few hours and can’t find a solution. Since Dorico won’t allow me to specify more tracking / kerning between the chord letter and chord symbol, I took my font into Glyphs and increased the sidebearing for all characters, exporting it as a “Dorico Chords” version of the font. This successfully increased the kerning between the chord letter and symbol in the actual-chord line. But WHY does Dorico smash them together in the Capo line? It’s somehow overriding the sidebearing properties of the font itself.
