Is there any way to limit certain Font lists to SMuFL fonts only. I don’t even remember which of my fonts are SMuFL, plus which having so many irrelevant non-SMuFL fonts in a fonts list is time consuming.
TIA
Nice idea, but I’m not sure there is a way to check whether a font is SMuFL compliant except by how it fails…
Would the fact that SMuFL fonts require an accompanying JSON file be the trigger point to limit only to SMuFL fonts? Just asking as fonts are not my area of expertise by any means.
There are ways to tell if a font claims to be SMuFL – for example, in the Music Fonts dialog, Dorico only displays those fonts. But you’re right that there’s no good way to tell how complete the font is.
@MusiComPublishing Which other font lists do you think it would be useful to restrict to SMuFL fonts?
Some fast research finds that our own @dspreadbury is the editor for SMuFL.org. Perhaps he could weigh in on this when he has a moment…
Any of the font lists where only a SMuFL font would work.
Such as? Font/Character/Paragraph styles can all be any kind of font. I guess possibly the font selectors on the Glyph tab for Music Symbols/Playing Techniques/Edit Notehead/Line Annotations etc., but even there someone might want to use a glyph from a non-music font. (Or from a non-SMuFL music font.) It might be useful in those dialogs to have a checkbox or something to restrict the font list to SMuFL.
Are there other places you were thinking of? I can’t offhand think of any others that should always be restricted to SMuFL.
It would be very convenient to be able to have the option to limit the font list in many cases to SMuFL fonts only, in various glyphs contexts. And beyond that, WYSIWYG font lists would be terrific, though admittedly a luxury.
Dorico does have the ability to limit fonts to “SMUFL-compliant” ones, though this is only used (and, indeed, only truly required) for the Music Fonts dialog box. The Dorico documentation only mentions the presence of “appropriate metadata”, which probably does refer to the accompanying JSON file, as deciding this.
Only the Music Fonts window qualifies in this case—and, by extension, the “Music font” drop-down menu in the Hub when creating a new project. Now, in fairness, it would be nice to useful to add a “SMUFL-only” checkbox to places like the Music Symbols editor. Keep in mind, though, that you can use a non-SMUFL music font there—any font at all, in fact, even if it’s not intended for music (to define custom symbols, for example).
For now, in the absence of such a checkbox, your best bet would be to consult the Music Fonts dialog box as a detour. Make a note of the fonts on that list, and then if you need a SMUFL font somewhere else, select a font from that shortlist. You should be able to type the name into the accompanying search bar most of the time to make the selection faster than hunting through the entire list; e.g., “Br” for Bravura.
If you’re thinking of changing a Font Style, then you must surely have some font in mind; and the chances are that you’re going to use one Music font and maybe one or two text typefaces.
Most Font Styles that use SMuFL, like Figured Bass, Chord Symbols Music Text, Fingering, etc are all “children” of the Default Music Text Font, so if you change that one, the rest will follow. So you don’t really need to know whether those fonts use SMuFL fonts or not: they change automatically when you change the Parent.
Yes, but that’s beside the point. I do a lot of customizing and in doing so I frequently have font menus where the only real world choice would be a SMuFL font, and yet the font menu has every font on my system. So far I resort to typing the first few letters of the other SMuFL fonts that I remember, but with so much to keep up with I sometimes have to go check my actual SMuFL font list since I have quite a few and I don’t do it often enough to always remember every single one.
It would be convenient—for me—to have the option of some of my font menus listing only the relevant, i.e., SMuFL fonts, but I understand now that that is not possible and I’ll move on.
I don’t find it unreasonable at all to want to list, at the user’s discretion, only SMuFL fonts in context of the work at hand. So I would support that being an option to avoid the messiness of wading about and attempting to remember which fonts are what. A simple filter should not be a big deal if Dorico already can determine which fonts are SMuFL.
This is not simple. Fonts do not carry a flag that says SMuFL. It’s a matter of the font conforming to a long, complex standard and having all the music glyphs in exact and expected locations. There’s no easy heuristic to determine this. SMuFL fonts all have different numbers oof glyphs depending on how many the type designer has implemented.
Music fonts in Dorico need to be SMuFL. But I don’t see why you need SMuFL fonts for text.
And yet, as noted above, the Music Fonts dialog manages to do it. So it should be possible to use the same filter in other dialogs.
If it is true as @kasky1 noted above that SMuFL fonts require a JSON file, one should be able to create some sort of filter to check for those….
The SMuFL spec recommends but does not require a metadata file.
I still have to ask why you require a SMuFL font for text.
I don’t.
As I have already explained, it would be convenient to have the option of a SMuFL-fonts-only filter for font lists where SMuFL fonts are the only relevant options. There are many such lists in Dorico.
Dorico requires a JSON file for all SMuFL fonts, which are accessible for the Music Font list. So, a filter for SMuFL font+JSON already exists in Dorico.
An obvious case for displaying only SMuFL fonts is the Music Symbols Editor. Another annoyance is that the font selector falls back to Bravura every time you open this window or select a symbol (from the list on the left).
Except that SMuFL does not require the Json file. So a SMuFl compliant font could arrive without a Json and not be recognised as such by Dorico.