I am new to Dorico Pro 5. I work primarily in choral music. I have been trying to change the font of lyrics but so far I have not been successful. How do I do this?
Welcome to the forum @moldenkg !
Here’s some information about the paragraph styles Dorico uses for lyrics (these were changed from “font” styles to “paragraph” styles during the Dorico 4 cycle).
On a side note, I think you’ll really enjoy working in Dorico for choral music: when I’m not wearing my Dorico manual-writing hat, I also write the odd piece of choral music, and I find it incredibly pleasing to do in Dorico.
Some highlights and tips:
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If you set up SATB as section players, you can then divide them onto more staves as needed, and Dorico will show the divide/rejoin arrows automatically for you!
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Take a look in Library > Engraving Options > Lyrics – I tend to reduce some of the minimum horizontal gaps (especially around hyphens), as this lets lyrics sit closer together, which distorts note spacing less. This may or may not suit your preferences, but it’s a handy one-stop-shop to be aware of for altering the default spacing of the music.
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Copying lyrics is pretty easy and streamlined, including from an external text editor
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Another couple of tips…
Something I find very useful with choral music is automatic condensing.
If you want divisi represented as two notes on one staff where it’s understandable to singers, and as two staves where it’s not, you can write everything on separate divisi staves and then apply condensing to achieve that automatically.
The benefit is that you don’t have to make a decision on how notes should be distributed across staves until you’ve completely finished writing the music and lyrics. Another gain is that writing each line on a separate staff makes it easier to see what’s going on and spot mistakes, and you can audition each voice independently more easily.
Second tip: experiment with creating note spacing changes in engrave mode. This can make it easy to have different note spacing so for different passages, which is much cleaner than adjusting bars directly.
Thanks for the quick reply. That worked. My second question is on the length of a staff line. I have a single line of music on a page that is only three short measures long. I would like to shorten the staff line on the page so that the music is not so spread out. How do I do that?
One more question on fonts for lyrics. Is it possible to import a font not currently available in Dorico?
Of course! You can use any font installed on your system. No need to import anything.
Yes, you can increase the threshold for horizontally justifying systems. Or, find a way to fit those measures onto previous systems (if this isn’t the only system in the flow)?
Any font installed on your computer should show up in the drop-down list.
I highly recommend Nepomuk, which is one of the bundled fonts with Dorico, as it is specifically designed** for use in lyrics – it’s legible at small sizes and is quite compact. It is also evocative of type used on traditional engravings.
** by me, in fairness; which may affect my judgment.
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A small heads up for fonts. They are not embedded in the Dorico file (as far as I know) and hence to be installed if you send the file to another computer. I’m not sure about the situation with PDF-s?
That is standard practice. Fonts are not embedded in Dorico, same with Finale or Word or InDesign.
They are embedded in PDFs, yes.