Fonts in Dorico SE

Dorico
1

I have recently started using Dorico SE and have also downloaded the Finale Fonts mentioned in another thread sometime last year.
My question is why are they not working like the Bravura and Petaluma fonts included with Dorico
With those two fonts when selected from the Library:Music Fonts… dialog, both the music and text changes appropriately. But with the new fonts I downloaded only the music changes. In order to change the Title and other text elements I have to select each item and set the font for that piece of text. I have the “Update text fonts when changing music font” box checked, but it doesn’t seem to work except for Bravura and Petaluma.

I am using Mac Ventura. The .otf font files are all in the Library:Fonts folder. For each font there are two files eg Bravura/BravuraText or FinaleAsh/FinaleAshText (Some of them do have three or more versions to be honest with legacy and Bold or italic versions but I’m concentrating on the simpler ones first)
There are also folders in the Library:Application Support: SMuFL:Fonts folder containing .json files for each of the fonts, although there is only one folder for Bravura and one for Petaluma but multiple folders for, in the example above, FinaleAsh/FinaleAshText

Can anyone explain why in the Library:Music Fonts… dialog there is only one entry for Bravura and Petaluma but multiple entries for the others and how do I get the music and text to change together?

2

Text fonts will only change if the Music fonts have specific text fonts listed in their JSON file (which contains more information than the font format can contain about notation). The Finale fonts’ JSON files don’t actually list any text fonts to be used.

Also, MakeMusic (the makes of Finale) have created JSON files for their TEXT fonts, which are not needed, as they aren’t SMuFL music fonts. That’s why you see them in the Music Fonts list. Ideally, you should remove the JSON files for the Text fonts.

Always look for the global way first: you can change the Paragraph Styles under the Library menu, which will change every text frame that used that Style. (I assume that Dorico SE has this…)

1 Like
3

Dorico SE doesn’t provide a way to edit paragraph, character or font styles.

4

Thanks for the info. I was only trying them out really, I’m sure I can live with the two supplied fonts. Some gof the others I struggled to see the difference anyway.

5

You could possibly try modifying the JSON files for some of the Finale music fonts, to include a preferred text font family.

If yu open the Bravura JSON file in a decent text editor, you’ll see the following:

"textFontFamily": [
            "Academico",
            "Century Schoolbook",
            "Edwin serif"
        ],

You could add this bit to the engravingDefaults section of e.g. Finale Ash’s, to include Finale Ash Text.

“Make sure you keep a copy of the original file.”

6

That’s a brilliant idea, in fact I thought of something like that myself , but when I looked at the complexity of the json I decided it would have to wait until I had a bit more time. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, I’ll have a look later.