easy use of symbols

Hello everyone, I’m new here and I’m still evaluating this software, even though I really like it and I’m quite sure that I’ll purchase it in some weeks. I come from Musescore, and dorico should be my first serious investment for music notation softwares.

There’s one thing that I can do easily with Musescore but I still have to find a way (if there’s one) to do it with dorico: Using symbols while writing a text. That is, I can for example write that every quarter note a percussionist must hit one particular instrument, and with musescore I can put the music symbol corresponding to a quarter note. Or, I can use Mallet Symbols (I attach some pictures of them) instead of writing “use four mallets” or “change from drumstick to metal stick”. With Dorico I can’t do it so far, or?

Since Musescore is open source, I suspect also that those symbols are open source, So, can I import those symbols (or glyphs), as a custom set?

Yes, I’m a percussionist :wink:


Welcome to the forum, Carlo. I’m glad you’re enjoying using Dorico so far. It’s a tiny bit involved to include symbols in text, but it’s not too tricky once you get the hang of it. Once you have started typing your text with Shift+X and you see the text editing popover appear, the top left-hand control allows you to choose a character style called ‘Music text’, which uses the Bravura Text font by default. You can then copy and paste symbols from the SMuFL specification into the text item, and provided you use the ‘Music text’ character style, the correct musical symbol will appear.

Thank you very much Daniel!