Letter spacing getting lost in SVG export

Dorico
1

Hi,
When I tried to export a page of music into an SVG file, I noticed that the letter spacing did not match the original. I investigated this a bit further and I noticed that different fonts are affected in different ways. In the following screenshot I have lined up the Dorico output next to the SVG (Inkscape) output:

I have divided the text into five sections, sampling the current font with different letter spacings:

  1. Font: Academico, Character Style: (None)
  2. Font: Academico, Character Style: Music Text
  3. Font: Bravura Text, Character Style: (None)
  4. Font: Bravura Text, Character Style: Music Text
  5. Font: Bravura Text, Character Style: Music Text

As you can see, Academico’s letter spacing is getting completely ignored while Bravura Text’s letter spacing is getting lost in translation ending up in word spacing as long as the glyphs are not music symbols. The character style doesn’t seem to affect the result in any way.

I also want to mention that I tried to open the same SVG file in Internet Explorer and the result was the same, except that the letters (but not the clefs) of the Bravura Text font was replaced with Times New Roman (but the letter spacing was lost in translation in the same way as in Inkscape). I also tried to export the page into the other available formats, and it seems like SVG is the only format with this problem.

All the best!

Annotation 2020-03-27 235822 Letter spacing.png
Annotation 2020-03-27 235822 Letter spacing.png436×544 61.2 KB

2

This is a limitation in Qt’s SVG export, I’m afraid. I suggest that you work around this by importing PDF into Inkscape instead, at least for the time being. (We may be able to address this by doing further development work on Qt’s SVG export routines, but that’s unlikely to be anything we have time for any time soon.)

3

Thanks for the tips! I’ll stick to PDF-export then!