You might want to try them as Playing Techniques too. You could create a library of different PTs with the positioning as you want it using the various types of brackets. They would then be easy to assign and you wouldn’t have to drag brackets around as text.
The lower dynamics are all actually Playing Techniques.
Yes, I assumed you were. In text (such as this post) I agree with Robert Bringhurst (q.v.) that parentheses around italics should be set in roman.
But for dynamics in a music score I agree with you (and engraving tradition), the parens should be italic. Good thing they are easily available in standard fonts.
Thanks, FredGUnn. They were appearing a bit too far to the left. The sf is passable but f and p and others were way off and you can’t simply move them around in the Music Symbol editor; that does nothing. I would show you but I don’t want to mess up what I’ve got. Maybe you could try it to see if I am wrong.
Yes, adding new playing techniques is also something I’m considering.
These particular dynamics are formatted thus to differentiate them from the other editorial markings: ‘Dynamics in parentheses according to the edition by Haslinger (Vienna, after 1833)’ (see the footnote on that page – note the asterisk in bar 1).
The brackets for the crescendo in bar 13 are not slanted (i.e. the marking is not Haslinger’s):
The brackets are not part of the dynamic.
It depends entirely on the function of the parenthesis but slanted brackets would be unusual and usually look terrible.
I’m not going to be back home to test until later tonight, but I wonder if modifying the glyph definition in the json that accompanies the font would make any difference.
In rereading the discussion from 3 years ago, I now find myself confused about whether it concerned parentheses, square brackets or both. In any case, I think there may be room for debate concerning upright square brackets vs. slanted ones, (and see both being used in standard publications) but not about italicized parentheses, which are commonly used around dynamic signs by many publishers.
Henle Beethoven Klavierstücke. I could find no use of non-italicized parentheses around dynamic signs or other italicized markings in this publication:
Distinguishing between items based on the style of the parentheses seems arcane to me, and I would never do that as an editor. Parentheses vs.square brackets, small vs. large type, combinations of the two is what I use. And I prefer angled square brackets around all editorial additions that are in italics such as dynamic signs; and it looks “mighty fine” to me.
Don’t know what a json is, FredGUnn, but if modifying it worked that would. be great! But please don’t spend too much time on this, I didn’t mean to set you a puzzle.
I’m pretty sure I experimented with those choices, but it was also the height of the symbol. The dynamics were not centering between the two staves as they should so I added padding below the dynamics to make that work.
But now I can’t remember if changing the height in the symbol in the Music Symbol editor actually does work without padding. I had a similar issue with Maestro numbers the last time I demoed Dorico and Daniel helped me reset the numbers to make them position properly as finger numbers and padding wasn’t involved. So maybe I am doing all this padding needlessly. I’m going back to start from 0.
Gosh golly, Ben. Trying to come to grips with Dorico and coming up with ways to make it work for me all at once ain’t easy.
You posted the example. That’s what they’ve done and they used slanted brackets to indicate a departure from the usual editorial markings.
You can do what you want but don’t pretend it’s what’s usual in scholarly editions. I can only reiterate that in such use, the brackets aren’t part of the dynamics.
If a composer has given a parenthetical marking, then the design might be a matter of utility or taste but most people don’t have enough experience or talent to know what will look good.
@Kim_Bastin gave a good example of a case where slanted brackets would not look right.
It might be worth checking whether it’s a Maestro issue or a Dorico one by switching to Bravura, to check.
It’s definitely not an issue with Bravura. That font works beautifully with the whole, as one would expect. And if I could, I would first learn Dorico as it stands without messing around with music symbols and such… But the point of my exercise is to see if Dorico will do what I need it to do. So I have to tackle everything at once.
Ben, I did some more experimenting and discovered that Align with left hand side of note heads actually centers the simplest Maestro dynamics like p and f both horizontally and vertically, but things are not good for more complex ones like sfz etc. So I am going to stick to padding around all the dynamics as needed and either create playing techniques for bracketed and parenthesized dynamics or add them as text.
It may be that FinaleMaestro needs ‘a bit of work’ to tailor it to Dorico. When I have a moment, I’ll have a look at it.
That’s very good of you, Ben. But please don’t spend too much time on it unless it is something that you can make use of.
As a SMuFL font designer yourself, I’m sure you know way more about how this works than I do, but I just looked at the Finale Maestro json and it’s missing all the “opticalCenter” entries that the Bravura json has. Does Dorico use that opticalCenter data, if available, when aligning and positioning dynamics? If so, I imagine the lack of it in the Finale Maestro json means that Dorico just uses the actual physical center for alignment, which may produce a less desirable result. Just a guess though.
Dorico doesn’t currently use the opticalCenter metadata when positioning dynamics. It’s something that has been on the backlog forever. One of these days we will get this implemented.
