Hi,
I’m a non-musician using Dorico 3.5 for a hymnal (not in English). I am not doing the engraving, just the lyrics and wordy stuff.
We are accustomed to using smallcaps for the word “Lord” and equivalents. I realize there is a work-around using macros for the English letters o-r-d to be presented in small caps. However, I need some non-English letters: č-į-š.
Daniel, do you have any idea when/if Open Type features will be added to Dorico? I’m trying to decide how much time to spend on this, or whether it’d be better to just leave it with the equivalent of “LORD” in full capital letters.
You’d be better doing them in all caps for the time being.
There has been talk about incorporating other rich text features, but Daniel has indicated that these are not natively supported by the underlying coding architecture that they use (qt) and so the dev team would have to build these things on themselves, which isn’t a negligible endeavor.
Hi Eric, there’s an easier way. If you’re using Minion Pro or another comprehensive font, you can assign dedicated small caps to some sort of shortcut.
I’ve assigned a macro to switch keyboards for this pretty easily, or you can simply copy-paste.
Romanos, I was thinking I might need to leave them as all caps for now in hopes there’d be a better solution in the future.
Dan, I agree that LORD is a bit “loud” or “in your face” and I think the small caps look more elegant. However, I have a problem: I can’t find small cap glyphs for all of the non-standard characters I need, which are Š Č Į. I was hoping to use Minion Pro, but I can’t find Š in it in small caps. So I checked this font which should have everything, and it also doesn’t have a small caps “s” with a caron on it.
Also, Dan, it looks as if your macro is an AHK script for Windows, but there is nothing for Mac. I’m using a Mac for this.
Possible solution for the characters with diacritics: if you can get C I S as small caps, use those and add the diacritics from the Combining Diacritical Marks Unicode block. Combining Caron is U+030C, Combining Ogonek U+0328. It would depend on the font how well this would work.
Just a follow-up to clarify that Minion Pro does indeed have the small-caps S with the caron, Unicode E060. Like Linux Libertine, Minion Pro is very comprehensive. I can’t recall ever needing a character it didn’t have.
Yes I have. I like Matthew’s work and I’m a big fan of his fonts (especially Valkyrie), but I don’t find this compelling at all. “Stop using Minion because you should be unique.” Eh.
Anyways, I take a bit of offense at his insinuation that people use Minion because they’re too lazy to make a choice. I worked very hard to find what I felt was the best font for my projects. I don’t care if other people use it!
Does anyone have suggestions for a good Chinese font—simplified and traditional character sets? I enjoyed Matthew Butterick’s book, but he didn’t have any suggestions about Chinese (I understand why).
Yes, I remember how hard you tried to find your typeface.
Thanks to this thread, I discovered I could use small caps without changing my font, and it’s a very nice thing.
I’m feeling rather dense here, but I’m still not understanding how this works. So you’re saying you can type small caps in the middle of an active lyric? I guess where I’m confused is: do you have to manually switch to the unicode keyboard on mac, type the codes, and then switch back? Or how have you set that up?
Those small caps are indeed triggered by unicode, so I’ve programmed my Streamdeck XL to type them for me (quite a simple setup, I copied the letters from the document shared up there to each button, I can explain if you need, but basically it’s what we were used to doing with the SMuFL characters on the web!)
I’m used to changing keyboards to enter unicode but I think today, I will add my two or three usual codes to this small caps page and Streamdeck XL will serve a lot more!
If you only need small caps to write Lord, the easiest way would be to write it once with the good characters (either by typing unicode or copy-pasting each letter in a text app), copy it somewhere and trigger a paste with some application, like streamdeck, Keyboard maestro, etc.
L
This is Lord with “ord” in small caps in Libertine O. Simply copy paste it with the right font and it works.
Note that these small caps are not standard Unicode characters. They sit in the U+E0xx range, i.e. ‘private’. They happen to be part of the Libertine font (which is great), but don’t expect them in other fonts.
