'Edit Font Styles' dialog preview is clipping

Hello Dorico team,

Congratulations to an excellent version 4! There are many reasons to be happy about it, including the font previews in the ‘Edit Font Styles’ and ‘Edit Paragraph Styles’ dialogs. However, as you can see in the attached image, I’m using a rather wide default font (Besley*) for my default template and as a result, it’s being wrapped and clipped in the preview area (when in reality it does not need to be either of those in order to fit).

As you can imagine, this is does not really have a serious effect on the workflow, but is rather just mildly annoying (and in a way quite cute, as if the text is being overly polite to the border and does not want to upset it by not keeping a safe covid distance…), but I’m guessing this is not the intended behavior so in case this is unknown, I’m reporting it now.

That’s odd – do you see a similarly extremely clipped preview for any other fonts?

I have looked into it, and it seems like more or less all the fonts have some (small) amount of clipping while only some fonts wrap, where the clipping becomes extra noticeable, so it does not necessarily depend on the wideness of the font, but rather something unknown. What’s more curious is that it’s usually only a subset of the styles in a font family that wraps.

I tested all my installed fonts set to Regular and if the problem showed up, I went on and tested the other styles. By doing so, I found that the following fonts had this wrapping issue (resulting in very obvious clipping):
Besley* Regular
Besley* Medium Regular
David Libre Regular
Opus Big Time Std Regular
Opus Big Time Std Italic
Opus Big Time Std Bold
Opus Big Time Std Bold Italic
Reprise Big Time Std Regular
Reprise Big Time Std Italic
Reprise Big Time Std Bold
Reprise Big Time Std Bold Italic
Webdings Regular
Webdings Bold

I suspect the issue is that these fonts have unusual metrics. Certainly the old Sibelius fonts will have unusual metrics, as they’re not intended to be used as text fonts, so it’s probably something related to that. I’ll try to take a look at some point.

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I’ve noticed one other thing that is odd, and after searching the forum, I have yet to find anyone else mentioning it, and this seemed the appropriate thread to mention it since it’s about the font styles dialogue.

At the top of my list of fonts, there’s a random entry for “Arial” as its own category. Is this expected?

I notice that the star for “save as default” is highlighted, but as I literally NEVER use Arial as a font, I cannot fathom how this could have come to pass. Is this just me inheriting some weirdness from years ago, or do other users see it too?

Nope, my list begins with Bar Repeat Count.

Thanks for confirming my suspicions. I suspect that this is some weird holdover from some experiment I did years ago and I’ve just never noticed. Either that, or I did save a new style as one of my preferred fonts and for some reason it was reset when D4 was installed and it defaulted back to Arial since that’s my first font alphabetically.

Actually, I’m seeing similar behaviour in D3.5; since I installed the “Golden Age” font, it shows up as a separate entry in the Font Styles list:

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That’s to be expected: when you use Library > Music Fonts to change the default music font used by the project, Dorico will create a new font style for the new music font, for its own use when setting things up as part of the switch to the new font.