Font styles handling in Dorico...

Dorico
1

Hi,

I searched the forum before posting this, apologies if I’m asking the same question again.

I’m struggling with my font styles in Dorico, some do work, and some do not. Well, I developed a regular font with small caps, Italic, Oblique, Heavy, Heavy Italic, and Heavy Oblique, and strangely only the Heavy styles worked in Dorico, the regular ones do not.

I then renamed the same regular style to medium now the small caps and Bold versions worked, but the italic, bold italic and oblique do not…

The crazy thing is that I developed another kind of font with the same styles, Light, Regular, Bold, and Heavy each with their Italic and Oblique styles and they all work in Dorico. I’m having headaches why Dorico sometimes goes blind and why sometimes it goes not.

Actually all the fonts above WORK finely on Pages, TextEdit, and FontBook, they do show correctly, they even work like charm in other music notation software.

Have you encountered such anomalies? Thanks for your reply.

2

How does the ‘not working’ manifest itself? Do they just not show up in the font menu, or something else?

Can you test them against another Qt app? MuseScore and Sibelius both use Qt, I believe.

3

Hi,

I tested the same fonts in MuseScore, Sibelius, Finale, the font menu shows correctly, and the fonts change smoothly, in Dorico, I have them shown in the font menu but when I select a font from my font menu list it does not take effect. I can post screenshots if you want.

4

A font should only have 4 styles corresponding to regular, italic, bold and bold italic otherwise there will be some mismatch and some styles will not be recognised.
If you have a font with 6 styles the solution is to create one font with a dedicated family name with 4 styles and another font with a family name different from the first with the 2 other styles.

5

Tell that to Adobe. Kepler Std has 168 styles! Garamond Premier has 34 styles. Myriad has 40, and Minion Pro has 65. Source Serif has 12 styles.

I believe Windows has a problem dealing with multiple font styles, but On MacOS, you can have any number (and names) of styles in one family. The OP is on Mac.

6

But Dorico on mac suffers from thar Style problem, as I already told Nordine. Maybe Daniel could chime in and suggest a workaround, given his knowledge both on SMuFL and Dorico.

7

Dorico always offers the four ‘standard’ styles for any given font, even if they don’t exist.

But if the fonts do exist, then they should be selectable.
Screenshot 10.png

8

Yes of course, as it has been often mentioned in this forum this is a Window problem.
But grouping 4 styles under one specific family name is a safe and sure way to avoid any confusion and to get exactly the style you choose in Dorico.
Of course this is only possible if you are familiar with a font editor programm but surely NorFonts is able to do this.

9

Provided you name the fonts in the expected way, they should work satisfactorily on both Windows and macOS in Dorico.

I would recommend looking at the naming scheme employed by one of the big Adobe families, or something like Akzidenz-Grotesk Pro. I’ve attached a screenshot showing the way the names are set up for e.g. the Light weight (non-italic) of the latter font is set up.

If you need any specific help on how to set up the fonts so that they will appear as expected on both Windows and macOS, you can send them to me and I can make specific suggestions.

font-names.png
font-names.png1138×764 58.9 KB

10

Thank you guys for your inputs. I appreciate it!

Here is the list of my BopMusic fonts for Dorico, they all show ok in Dorico with no problem:

BopMusicSMFLText.otf (music text font)
BopMusicSMFL.otf (music font)

BopMusicAlpha-Regular.otf (added small caps for chords)
BopMusicAlpha-Oblique.otf
BopMusicAlpha-Light.otf
BopMusicAlpha-Light Oblique.otf
BopMusicAlpha-Light Italic.otf
BopMusicAlpha-Italic.otf
BopMusicAlpha-Enclosure.otf
BopMusicAlpha-Bold.otf
BopMusicAlpha-Bold Oblique.otf
BopMusicAlpha-Bold Italic.otf

Below is the list of my RealScore fonts for Dorico, only the Heavy styles works perfectly:

RealScoreSMFLText.otf (music text font)
RealScoreSMFL.otf (music font)

RealScore Alpha-Medium.otf (added small caps for chords)
RealScore Alpha-Medium Oblique.otf
RealScore Alpha-Medium Italic.otf
RealScore Alpha-Medium Enclosure.otf
RealScore Alpha-Heavy.otf
RealScore Alpha-Heavy Oblique.otf
RealScore Alpha-Heavy Italic.otf
RealScore Alpha-Enclosure Heavy.otf

However, before I release my NorFonts for Dorico last month I was thinking about including only one text font style just like Petaluma Script, but later I decided that my customers would enjoy having more styles.

Daniel, I will email you the fonts and tell me what you think. Thanks a lot in advance for your kind help!!

11

Daniel, please check your email. Thank you very much for your assistance.

12

Presumably there’s something about Medium that it doesn’t like.

Also:don’t fonts usually have either Oblique or Italic, but not both?

13

Isn’t italic for serif fonts and Oblique for san serif fonts?

14

Not exclusively. Italic is usually a completely different design; oblique is just pushed over a bit. :laughing:

15

Minion Pro: Oblique on top, italics below.

Ever since I was shown the difference, I can’t stand to see oblique. It looks like the font had one too many…

16

Solved! thanks.

17

It would be helpfull for others with similar issue to tell exactly how you did solve it :wink:

18

I had a problem with naming my styles, this post below by Daniel helped a lot.

19

Well your answer stays a little bit cryptic and some precise instructions on how you did solve this could be helpfull for others because this issue is often mentioned in this forum, but well.

What I am interested in is if the solution I suggested: one “Family name” with 4 styles only (BTW this solution is coming from older threads on this theme and some advices from Daniel) is not necessary any more and if Dorico is able to recognise more than 4 styles within a font family with one “Family name”
With “Family Name” I do not mean of course the name of the font file but the Family Name which is to find inside the font self as shown in the attached jpeg from Daniels post.

20

As said, I changed the weights of my fonts and it’s solved. The problem was with my Italic and Bold Italic that do not work in Dorico.

What I did:

Instead of naming my font as Regular I renamed/changed the weight to Medium, instead of Bold I used SemiBold, then their Italic versions just worked, I mean Medium Italic and SemiBold Italic.

Why renaming this way?

Just because Dorico still wants to read Regular, Bold to pick the Italic and Bold Italic??? a brute force??? So to escape this I changed the weight of my fonts and it worked.

The very strange story is this:

BopMusic Alpha fonts are named correctly just like BopMusic Alpha Regular, BopMusic Alpha Italic, BopMusic Alpha Bold, and BopMusic Alpha Bold Italic and they’re shown in Dorico’s font menu with no problem. Now, I don’t know why Dorico doesn’t read my RealScore Alpha EVEN being named the same way as BopMusic Alpha and even they are shown correctly in FontBook, Pages, MS WORD, TextEdit, Ai, Id, CorelDraw …

I even tried to upload my RealScore Alpha fonts into the Monotype Font Platform where I used to check/test all my fonts before being released to the public on myfonts.com, and I get no issue there, they were all marked as valid with 0 issues.

Another strange thing is that in the Dorico’s font menu, I mean after changing from Regular weight to Medium and from Bold weight to Semi Bold, the Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic do still show in Dorico’s font menu along with Medium, Medium Italic, SemiBold and SemiBold Italic??? Isn’t Dorico supposed to read only the actual weights? very confusing!

NOTE: Oblique can be any font slanted to the right and even to the LEFT. Italic is another thing, italic is a true italic font, meaning that every glyph is redrawn from scratch whereas an oblique font is just any regular font being SLANTED to whatever angle you want.

Anyway, thanks a lot for your inputs, forget it…very very tired doing these tests for more than 1 week…I’m done :slight_smile:

—End of my story—