My name is Majd Maary, Executive Administrator and Studio Lead at Dozan World Publishing, a Middle Eastern sheet music publisher working with universities, conservatories, and choirs internationally.
We are seriously considering moving our entire engraving workflow from Finale to Dorico. Dorico already meets almost all of our professional needs and we would love to standardize on it. However, there is one critical feature that is currently holding us back:
We use a custom IPA-based system for Arabic and Middle Eastern phonetics, which depends on having bold and underlined characters within the lyrics attached to notes. In Finale (and similarly in Sibelius), we can apply this formatting directly in the lyrics tool to individual characters or syllables, and they remain properly aligned with the notes.
In Dorico, we have not yet found a way to:
Apply bold/underline to specific syllables or characters within lyrics
While still keeping them attached and aligned as normal lyrics (not as separate text frames)
This ability is not cosmetic for us; itâs essential to how we convey pronunciation and meaning to performers. Practically speaking, whether Dorico can support this is the deciding factor in whether our editorial team fully migrates from Finale.
My questions are:
Is there currently any supported way to achieve bold/underline within lyrics in Dorico (perhaps via a specific lyric or text style workaround)?
If not, is support for inline bold/underline in lyrics something that could realistically be added to the Dorico roadmap?
We would be very grateful for any guidance or clarification from the Dorico team. If there is a better channel to discuss this kind of feature request, Iâm happy to follow up there as well.
Many thanks for your time and for the incredible work youâre doing on Dorico.
Hello Majd, salaam alaikum and welcome to the forum. Dorico does in fact have an Edit Lyric dialog, where you can alter the formatting of single characters within a lyric syllable. See the manual: Steinberg
Would this serve your needs?
Yes, weâve tried the Edit Lyric / Edit Single Lyric dialog, and it does allow character-level formatting. However, itâs not what we need for production: because it has to be applied one lyric at a time, it becomes extremely time-consuming and doesnât make sense when bold/underline is a core part of the lyric system across an entire score. Itâs fine for an occasional one-off edit, but not a scalable workflow for publishing.
What weâre looking for is a more direct ârich textâ lyric editing experience (highlight + Cmd/Ctrl-B / Cmd/Ctrl-U) similar to Finale/Sibelius.
In Preferences, you can assign your own keyboard shortcut to the Edit Single Lyric command, and the shortcuts for bold or underline work just fine in the dialog window. So compared to the Finale way, itâs two key-strokes more per syllable. You will have to decide for yourself if that makes it a deal-breaker.
Of course you are welcome to submit this as a feature request, and by posting here you already did. But the functionality itself is already there, not to mention that âthe Finale wayâ might also violate some of Doricoâs design guidelines separating content from presentation. So Iâm afraid itâs unlikely to be taken into consideration any time soon. (I am not a Steinberg employee btw, this is just my prediction as a long-time user.)
That said I did consider another workaround, which is more laborious upfront but may save you a lot of effort in the long run. Provided that the number of characters which need bold or underlined versions is somewhat limited, you could take the font that you use in your house style for lyrics and modify it so that you can access those altered characters in plain text. At least for Arabic I know there are multiple existing romanisation schemes to choose from, maybe using the number keys or making certain digraphs into ligatures. Then the font would take care of the custom formatting without needing the Edit Single Lyric dialog at all. If that sounds feasible, there are some folks on here who know much more about font modding than I do, though.
Looking at the sample scores on Dozan Worldâs website, it really is about single characters whose bold/underlined variants have phonetic significance in transcribing Arabic and some other languages. Other letters have diacritics, and thereâs indeed some IPA in there too. I think by using various ligatures and substitutions, a modified Arial could easily take care of all of those at the same time.
Sadly, not a Dorico lua macro, because Doricoâs scripting language canât deal with what happens inside of dialogs. But probably Keyboard Maestro or AutoHotKey.
I did this by modifying the font to create a ligature that returns a/ as an underlined a. As @hrnbouma says, a little tedious up front, but once and done.
There the OP also wanted to underline individual characters (not possible in Dorico at the time), which actually turned out to be a need for IPA diacritics used in Hebrew transliteration.
Itâs way better to use the under-line diacritic â ̱â (U+0331, combining macron below), than to use an underscore style. And TBH, Iâm surprised to learn that the bold style is considered phonetically meaningful in your transliteration. Thatâs not part of the IPA standard.
In the example Hugo showed above, it looks like itâs actually used in your customised IPA. Out of linguistic curiosity, can you tell me what Arabic letters are distinguished by a difference between bold/plain? BTW, although I donât speak Arabic (nor Hebrew, for that matter), I am familiar with both writing systems and various transliterations. In principle, Unicode supports this all without resorting to typographic style changes. After all, text written in any language should also work in plain text-only applications.
To be honest, Iâm not sure if I (or our team) can achieve this without some guidance from you. Ultimately, what weâre hoping for is a way to apply bold and underline together in very specific spots within the lyrics. Please let me know if thatâs possible and how youâd recommend doing it.
Thatâs a great question, thank you for asking so thoughtfully.
Weâve actually patented a customized IPA system for Middle Eastern languages, built specifically for choral and educational use. The core issue weâre responding to is that in Arabic (and other middle eastern languages), singers donât only âsing the vowelsâ as in many Western pedagogical models, consonants themselves are often sustained, emphasized, or released in very specific rhythmic places. That nuance is crucial for both authenticity and intelligibility.
