There are many different items in the Music Symbol editor under Fingering. Fingering 1 , Fingering 1 italic, Fingering 1 plain, Fingering one plain italic etc. Are all of these accessible by keyboard commands in the Fingering popover?
And if so, what are the commands?
If not, I would create special fingering symbols that I need as new Playing Techniques. Is it possible to advance the Playing Technique popover note by note as with the Fingering Popover?
Almost certainly, although it will depend on what type of fingering you’ve input.
Thank you, Lillie_Haris. I had read the first excerpt already, but it didn’t seem to answer my first question. The second excerpt doesn’t seem connected to my issue.
Perhaps an example would help.
Let’s say I modify the “Fingering 1 italic” entry under Fingerings in the Music Symbol editor to become a 1 followed by an elision symbol or whatever. I would like to insert this new symbol into a piano piece using the fingering popover. What do I type into the popover?
And I would like to modify all of the fingering entries under “Fingering” in the Music Symbol editor to other special symbols. Is it possible to assign "popover text to each of them that will allow me to enter these symbols?
Or is there already text assigned to each one that would allow me to enter these? If there isn’t, why are these entries, like “Fingering 1 plain” even there?
If that is not possible, as I suspect, I would create new Playing Techniques for these fingering symbols and assign them that way using the Playing Technique popover. But this doesn’t seem as good because I don’t know how to advance the Playing techniques popover from note to note by using the space bar the way I can insert fingering using the fingering popover.
So I am just checking to see if there are capabilities that I am unaware of that would allow me to use the Playing Techniques popover as efficiently as the Fingering popover.
So I guess the answer is “no” to both questions.
One is restricted to 1-7, ( ) and - for piano fingering in the Fingering Popover and there is no way to move from note to note while using the Playing Techniques Popover.
It’s entirely possible to move from note to note while using the Playing Techniques Popover.
Rinse and repeat steps 3 and 4.
Thanks, pianoleo. That’s good to know.
But if means invoking a new popover for each note, it is not exactly what I was looking for. What I was hoping for was what happens with the fingering popover, where one can move from note to note within the same popover “window” without constantly needing to go Shift-F for each entry.
If this assumption was based on not getting a response from UK-based members of the Dorico team and/or forum contributors between 8.49pm on a Friday and 2.15pm on a Saturday, might I take the opportunity to remind you politely that any responses from Dorico team members here are done in addition to our duties and that sometimes, people have other commitments on Friday evenings and during the daytime at weekends that might prevent them responding to forum threads within 24 hours.
As to your question: as far as I understand it, if you modify the glyphs used for various fingerings, those glyphs will get used in the same circumstances as those original fingering glyphs would get used. Therefore, what you would type into the fingerings popover wouldn’t change, it would simply be the resulting appearance in the music that would change. However, you wouldn’t be able to use the non-edited and edited fingerings for the same purposes simultaneously in the same project.
If you want truly customized notations, playing techniques are probably the best way to go. But exactly, the playing techniques popover is not the fingerings popover, and will not behave the way the fingerings popover behaves.
You’re more than welcome to provide examples of (ideally published) music demonstrating the edits you would want to make to fingerings, in order to demonstrate the use-cases and for the team to consider for potential changes/additions to the existing fingering feature. With the usual caveat that promises can’t be made for implementation etc.
There’s an Engraving Option that allows you to specify whether the “Bold” or “Plain” styles should be used. I’m pretty sure it’s one or the other, so you can’t freely switch between them to redefine a glyph in another style.
You can certainly redefine 6 or 7 to be something else, but that’s of course only 2 options. Gif below:
I just did a little experiment, and it’s pretty easy to add additional fingering options with a doricolib file. I’m not sure if there’s any way to connect them to the popover though, so they obviously are pretty worthless without that. I’ll play around with them some more and see if I can figure out if that might be possible.
I’m very sorry, Lillie_Harris. I didn’t mean to offend you and hope that you will forgive me. I am very grateful for the help that I have received from the Dorico staff and don’t expect instant answers. I got to feeling that my two questions really didn’t deserve another response, and that I wouldn’t be getting one, since the answers are really self-evident in the excerpts you recommended and what I understand about Dorico.
I use special (non-standard) combinations of standard fingering glyphs that I can create in the music symbol editor. The fact that I can’t input them by means of the fingering popover is the problem. It is tantalizing, because I see this long list of music symbols that I could modify and use, but there is no way to actually enter them in the fingering popover.
Using the playing techniques popover is possible, but has its own issue of centering the entire symbol over the note heads. I need just the number part of the symbol centered, and would have to adjust every symbol so entered.
I admire many aspects of Dorico and would like to start to use it in my work, but I am grappling with a few remaining issues that are impediments and would love to solve them.
Thanks so much FredGUnn. If you could come up with something I would be eternally grateful.
Here is the example requested by Lillie_Harris:
The numbers with the upper and lower elisions need to be input as a single glyph. I thought that I could use 6 and 7 for those in the fingering popover, but it puts the elision next to the number, too far over to the right, as a separate character.
Sorry, I’m thinking this just isn’t possible. As I mentioned, I can add as many custom glyphs or text to the fingering category with a doricolib file, but there doesn’t seem to be any sort of user-editable mechanism to give any new fingering a popover assignment that will work with a Piano. Or if there is, I haven’t figured it out.
Perhaps someone with more doricolib skills than I have can solve it, but if the popover assignments aren’t in any way visible here, then I don’t think additional functional custom fingerings can be added. Playing Techniques seem the only way to go here.
Thanks for investigating that, FredGUnn. It’s worth knowing that there is really no other way to do it.
Suppose that when you enter 7 in the fingering popover, you want to obtain a 3 with a lower elision and have the 3 centered on the notehead like this:
It is possible by changing Fingering 7 in the Edit Music Symbol dialog so it looks like this:
After deleting the existing glyph, I added three others: a space character (U+20), fingering3 (U+ED13) and lyricsElisionNarrow (U+E550). For the elision glyph, I set the X-Offset to -2, the Y-Offset to -0.5 and the Y-Scale to 60. For the digit glyph, I set the X-Offset to 3.3 so the digit would be in the center of all the glyphs horizontally.
That looks interesting, johnprice. But I need to create under and over elision characters that will work for all numbers from 1-5. For example, if I use your settings but omit the 3 and leave the elision in place and then type 57 into the fingering popover, will the elision be centered under the 5 instead of next to it?
No.
You can use settings similar to mine to create playing techniques that combine the fingering digits with the upper or lower elision and have each digit centered on its notehead.
Thanks, johnprice. Now I get it. You were referring to the playing techniques popover, not the fingering popover. Excellent. I will try your settings. I had given up on that approach because an earlier thread mentioned that playing techniques (as a whole unit) were always centered over the note head and there was no way to change that.
In the meantime I discovered that one can select all playing techniques in the score with a keyboard command and move them as a group. So that could also work.
Sorry, johnprice, but I am confused again. Your picture shows the Music Symbol editor. Can one use symbols edited in the Music Symbol editor as Playing Techniques? I thought that playing techniques had to be edited in the Playing Techniques editor.
In any case, your basic trick is to use a space character to center the number part of the playing technique, which is very clever, and with which I will experiment.
One question remains. How does one use unicode symbols to find the glyphs in the Playing Techniques editor? I couldn’t find this in the manual. I tried typing in U+20 in “From” and “To” with Unicode Tab set instead of SMuFL and nothing comes up, maybe because Bravura doesn’t have that symbol. But what font does have a space character and how to I get it?
John, do you ever use chord symbols at all? Like, ever? If not, it just dawned on me that you can switch to “Nashville” style chord notation, redefine roots 1-5 to use the fingering glyphs, then pick any two suffixes to redefine as your elisions. I picked 6 for under and 7 for over, but it doesn’t really matter. Chord symbols give you lots of control over positioning too. After I made the edits to the glyphs, here is the default positioning I’m currently getting.
Of course these are all easy to enter with the popover so I can just arrow over to the next note like in the gif below:
Anyway, just an idea if you don’t use chord symbols.
OMG. That looks like the answer to my prayers, FredGUnn. No, I am embarrassed to say that I’ve never used chord symbols in computer engraving. (Plenty in my hand-copying days.) This is exciting. Maybe there are other things I can do with it, like both elisions and hyphens between numbers, which is another sticking point for me. OK. I may need some hand-holding, but will see what I can do.
Great, glad that might be an option! Give me a few minutes and I’ll post a doricolib file that contains all the glyph settings I was using.
