Font Formatting Organization/Options

Carrying over conversations from the Facebook Forum - asking why there isn’t an option to create Score vs Part properties for “Font Styles” items, as there is with “Paragraph Styles?”

While combing through annoying details to wrap up the engraving part of the workflow, I printed a draft of the score. As I cleaned up errors, I realized that they were plentiful enough to warrant re-creating the parts.
This meant needing to go in to “Font Styles” and changing properties of Rehearsal Marks, Immediate Tempo Text, Graduate Tempo Text, Metronome Text, and Metronome Music Text.
Reset all five of those - export parts. Go back in again and reset them all again - export the score (I always leave the score file saved with the correct score settings).
To make items such as tempo markings, rehearsal marks, etc. sizable enough to be easy to view for a conductor on an 11x17 page, the same texts look comical on the parts. Likewise, a good font for the parts becomes too small to easily see while standing/conducting. “Absolute” font sizes help, but it’s still not enough.
Also - I understand that there might be some instances where one would want different sized fonts for one tempo item compared to another, but I would guess the majority of the time, the preference is consistency between immediate, gradual, etc. Can’t these be grouped together somehow to ease up the workflow? Perhaps set up like all of the “…Options” panels (Layout, Notation, Engrave, etc.) - where there is a menu choice on the left side of the dialogue and the main dialogue window has several options cascading below. A toggle at the top of the window can either tie all the tempo-related fonts together to match, or to allow the user to differentiate them.

Thanks much!

Hi. I might not really be answering your question but here’s my workflow.
I generally find that the default sizes are good for parts. Once I am happy with how the parts look, I set the properties to local (top-right corner of the properties panel), select Rehearsal marks, tempo markings, etc and hit Select more two or three times, in order to select all these objects. Then a custom scale (up to 200% sometimes) until I am satisfied with the looks of my score. This workflow is actually fast.

In the long term we plan to migrate many of the things that are currently using font styles to use paragraph styles. That would include tempo items. Paragraph styles provide more flexible and powerful functionality than font styles, but they also require a good deal of work to switch over existing things that use font styles to make them use paragraph styles. Had we implemented paragraph styles earlier in the development of Dorico 1.0, we would have used them from the outset, but they came relatively late and so it wasn’t practical.

5 Likes

It’s a joy to follow all the great updates to Dorico. However, I’m still REALLY missing tempo marks as a paragraph style in order to have different sizes in score and parts. I know the workarounds, but it’s not great for linking score and parts. My workaround was to have separate files for score and parts (just like in the old days with other notation software…) in order not to mess up the score when editing parts. Any chances to see this anytime soon…?

It’s certainly next on the hit list for things that need to migrate from font styles to paragraph styles, yes. I can’t say when it will be done, though.