'Minus' minor chord symbol formatting bug?

Hello everyone, new Dorico user here.

I noticed that the chord quality ‘-’ symbol shows some weird behaviour.

On ‘Baseline’ vertical position, the minus symbol is very small and looks subscripted, see Example-1:


When setting the vertical position to ‘Subscript’, the symbol appears in the same height as with
‘Baseline’, but actually larger, see Example-2:

In the ‘Appearance of minor triads’ settings category, the shown preview looks how I
would normally expect it, see Example-3:
minus-symbol-preview.png
The examples were created on a new empty project where I only changed the mentioned settings, everything else
left on default. I’m sure this can be corrected manually, but it does not appear as intended default behaviour.

Welcome to the forum, spacebass. I’ll have to dig into the specifics to see which characters it’s pulling out when these options are changed. Please give me a bit of time to look into it – it’s a very busy time for me just now so I might not be able to come back to you right away.

I can understand that, thank you for looking into it. I have some additional information that might be helpful, I tried it out with Dorico’s Petaluma Music Font as well.

In the ‘Baseline’ setting it looks small, thin and subscripted as well, see Example-4:


In the ‘Subscript’ setting it looks much bigger and thicker, and much like what I would ‘Baseline’ expect to look like, see Example-5:

In the ‘Superscript’ setting it looks the same as with ‘Subscript’ (bigger than ‘Baseline’, that is), but superscripted, see Example-6:

Update since Dorico 3 has been released in the meantime: The described behaviour persists in Dorico 3

Hi just bumping this issue back up. On my rig, I can’t alter the appearance of the dash/minus sign at all, even using the sub/superscript option. I’d like to have a nice solid “em” dash, rather than the tiny “en” dash that presently appears. If there’s a workaround to alter the appearance of the dash, I’d like to know it.

Try are this…

Thanks, very helpful. Now I have a decent look to it…

I also can’t find a way to have a “good looking” minor triad. Whatever option I choose, the minus signs look bad and difficult to understand:

Screenshot 2022-10-22 at 02.13.47
Screenshot 2022-10-22 at 02.13.19
Screenshot 2022-10-22 at 02.12.58

Is there a way to fix this?

Best

Define “good looking” (in particular what good would look like)

Something easier to read?

Screenshot 2022-10-22 at 02.30.30
Screenshot 2022-10-22 at 02.30.06

Unfortunately, at the moment Dorico only defines a single set of kerning values (which define the default horizontal relationship between the text and music font symbols in a chord symbol) for main chord symbols, and another for capo/transposed chord symbols, regardless of which fonts you’re actually using. This is something we plan to address in future.

In the meantime, you will need to make some manual adjustments for chord symbols that use Petaluma Script as the text font.

1 Like

Thanks for your help and time Daniel,

Best
-m