While I may agree with you, I notice that making the same point over and over does not make it more likely to occur sooner. Remember that the Team has to read this thread each time you restate your case.
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Do you have any updates on this? It would be great if this could be tweaked as there are other music fonts that don’t work as well as Bravura with the default settings. In some cases, f might even collide with the dynamic markings, especially if the suffix starts with a letter like h, k or l.
I was wondering the same thing.
I recently jumped the gun on the Dorico upgrade sale, and was playing around with all the new music fonts included, and stumbled upon this undesired behaviour only on certain fonts. Bravura and Leland look fine to me, while the others clearly are not generous with the spacing (or perhaps kerning?) between the forte f and the suffix. Here is a comparison, where the problematic cases are marked with an asterisk:
Forte with suffix (problematic as a rule rather than an exception)
Bravura
Finale Maestro*
Leipzig*
Leland
Sebastian*
Pianissimo with suffix (no apparent problem)
Bravura
Finale Maestro
Leipzig
Leland
Sebastian
This indicates that the problem is likely caused by an inconsistency between font metrics. It has obviously been proven to be too much to ask all SMuFL music font creators to adhere to the same standard here, so I believe that exposing this as a set of well thought out options would potentially be a universal life saver and consequently a very welcome update for those who wish give their scores a customized look.
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You’re right, that in fact the different fonts use different width metrics: here’s FinaleMaestro, where you can see the ‘width’ of the glyph does not include the extremities.
It’s possible that the altered widths are used in some programs to compensate for optical centring of the dynamic.
I’ll modify Sebastian accordingly, which also has a cropped width. Hopefully, that’s not going to affect anything else.
Bravura does seem to display correctly, and has widths covering the entire glyph.
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The SMuFL spec says all glyphs shall start at x = 0, and have 0-width side bearings, so no space on the left or right. This is obviously not standard typographical practice, and Dorico compensates for it by contracting the space after an f. It looks like the Finale people did not want to follow the spec when converting Maestro to SMuFL.
These are sensible things to do with a glyph of this shape, and IMO the constraint in the spec is working against good typography.