Edit all Fonts & Playback

Hi all,

I have a couple questions I couldn’t find the answer to in the forums already. If I missed it, please just link me to the appropriate threads:

  1. How do I edit all fonts or texts styles at once? (Alternatively, is there a text style menu I can access?)

  2. I am having trouble with playback unless I use one of the existing templates; I have read that playback only works with existing templates. Is this correct? If so, when is this expected to be addressed?

Thanks,
Jude

  1. You can’t easily, at the moment, because none of the various paragraph styles are currently hierarchically linked to each other, which is something I will change before the 1.0.10 update. For now, you could go through and change the ‘Parent’ value for each paragraph style so that they all inherit from e.g. ‘Default text’, and then set the various overrides as you want them to be set.

  2. No, you should find that playback through HSSE works fine in any project, whether it starts life from a template or not. Try Play > Reapply Default Playback Template to see if that helps.

Thanks Daniel,

Looking through the other posts, I’m seeing the term “paragraph styles” used quite frequently in reference to different kinds of text. Are “paragraph styles” synonymous to Sibelius’ “text styles”?

Yes, I think you can consider Dorico’s paragraph styles to be analogous to Sibelius’s text styles.

How do I go about changing the parent values for each paragraph style? Is there a list I can access? Also, is there a faster way to change the font of existing text. Currently I have to scroll through all the fonts on my machine (that is, I can’t simply type in the name of the font), and since the fonts I use begin with “U,” changing every instance of text is quite time consuming.

Being able to jump to a font in the list by typing the first letter of its name will definitely work as you expect in 1.0.10.

You can change the parent for each paragraph style in Engrave > Paragraph Styles: it’s the second drop-down, immediately below the name of the specific paragraph style you’re editing. I would recommend you start by setting the parent for each paragraph style to ‘Default Text’.

I don’t see tempo text as a paragraph style; is there a way to change the typeface for tempo text?

I’ve noticed other threads that discuss the unique qualities of tempo text; are there plans in the future to make this more customizable?

Tempo is a font style, not a paragraph style; see Engrave > Font Styles to edit its appearance.

What is the reason behind having “font styles” and “paragraph styles” different categories? (Feel free to link to another thread or article if you’ve gone into that elsewhere.)

Also, after changing the typeface of the tempo text, I noticed that the “A tempo” has a large amount of space between the individual letters (see image). Any insight on this? I use the Linotype Univers Condensed font family: Univers LT Standard, 57 Condensed.

Paragraph styles are for formatting whole paragraphs, including spacing and alignment.

Font styles are for formatting a run of text within a paragraph, such as a few words in italics, etc. The beauty of font styles is that, if you assign them properly, you can change your mind later about how you want those words formatted (for example, bold instead of italic, or small caps, etc.) without having to go through and find and change every occurrence individually within the text. In music copying we use text blocks with mixed fonts constantly, such as a metronome mark with a music note and regular text numerals.

Sorry I can’t answer the problem about Univers spacing being too wide and erratic.

In fact what Mark describes as “font styles” actually called character styles in Dorico, just as they normally are in other word processing and desktop publishing applications.

Font styles are simpler than both paragraph styles and character styles, as they basically just describe the font family, font style, and size of the font to be used by items that may or may not look like text. For example, all of the noteheads, clefs, etc. that Dorico draws use font styles under the hood, along with things that you are possibly used to thinking of as text from other applications, like tempo and dynamics.

I don’t know what’s going on with your Linotype font there, I’m afraid. It looks to me as if it’s choosing completely the wrong style. Are you on Windows or Mac? Perhaps you could email me your current project.

Ah, so more like a font declaration in CSS. Excellent! Thanks Daniel; sorry for the misnomer.

(P.S. I would have edited my above post to cross out occurrences of “font” and insert “character” to avoid misleading people, but this board doesn’t support strikethrough text.)

Daniel,

I’m on a Mac. I’m happy to send you my project. Where should I send it to?

Jude

Here’s something I really should know the answer to.

Is there a quick and easy way to change the default text font and have the new font that you’ve selected being applied in all the other text font instances? Daniel’s 2nd post here suggests it’s been done by now - but I’m finding it doesn’t - for example - affect Tokens.

You need to make a change in two places to affect all text in the project: change the ‘Default text font’ in Engrave > Font Styles to affect most notation items, and change ‘Default text’ in Engrave > Paragraph Styles to affect text in frames and some notation items.

Thanks Daniel.