Thank you! Does that mean that in order for the flats to look good everywhere I should avoid Garamond?
Use Minion for the flat glyph only. If I remember correctly, that works.
In most places the functionality seems to exist for Dorico to automatically substitute in music symbols from the music font, as long as you don’t override text on the page that contains music symbols.
I’d personally be tempted to forego showing player names on the first page of the score, which was impossible (in Dorico) until relatively recently, and either put up with it or doctor the text in a PDF editor on the way to the publisher/printer. Changing text fonts across the board feels a bit drastic to me.
My point is that the problem isn’t with Garamond; it’s with most fonts that aren’t Academico. Most text font developers aren’t concerned with how musicians are going to use their text fonts, so they don’t bother to build music symbols that play nicely with their alphanumeric characters. Dorico’s developers have made it possible to intersperse music symbols nicely among alphanumeric characters from any font; unfortunately that functionality doesn’t currently extend to the Player Names area.
Hopefully this’ll be addressed by Dorico’s development team.
@dan_kreider You can’t with player names. There’s no rich text editing.
Thank you!
So do I understand correctly, that if it is important for me to have the names of the instruments displayed (correctly) on the first name of the score, I could go with Academico, and possibly a few other fonts, but not Garamond?
If it’s important for you to be able to show multiple instruments (at least one of which is transposing), held by the same player, on the first page of music, then yes, you’re limited to Academico and any other text fonts that happen to have nice flat/sharp glyphs.
If it’s just a regular staff label of e.g. a Clarinettist holding a single Clarinet in B flat, then you don’t need to use Player Names, and the general staff label functionality handles this use case just fine (as demonstrated in your most recent screenshot).
Thanks. I thought it was important to me, but I may have to reconsider!
I appreciate all the help, cheers.
J
I’ve always wondered why Dorico is using this flat glyph anyway, when there’s an entire SMuFL range designed to go with text. From the Implementation Notes:
“These accidentals should be designed to be complementary to standard letter forms, for example when describing a note name such as “C sharp” or “A flat”. It is recommended that the stem for the flat is shortened, so that overall the flat has similar proportions to a lower-case letter b. It is likewise recommended that the counters in the sharp and natural are opened up to make them clearer at smaller sizes. This helps to balance the accidentals with the surrounding text.“
I cobbled together my own font in order to use those glyphs, as shown in my example earlier up in the thread. I prefer that flat anyway, as it seems like even when correctly used, Dorico is defaulting to the wrong glyph to use with text here.