I have some pieces written with Dorico Pro 5 using Finale Broadway Text. When I open the file in Dorico 6, the dialog box says there are missing font styles. Italic and bold seem to be the common missing ones. Anyone have a solution to this?
I assume you’re on Windows, yes?
Windows has traditionally handled fonts in an idiosyncratic way. It generally behaves as though each font has 4 styles: regular, bold, italic, and bold italic; if any of those 4 font files is missing, Windows would “fake” the style (by making the font heavier, or slanting it).
Dorico 6 now handles fonts in a more cross-platform way. One downside is that if you had been making use of these “faked” font styles, they are no longer available to you.
I believe that Finale Broadway Text only comes in a regular style.
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Now that I dug deeper, you are correct, there are no style fonts with Finale Broadway Text other than the regular font.
Finale’s Broadway fonts are actually Bold to emulate a scoring pen and India ink — there is no Regular.
The Scoring Notes overview by Ben Byram-Wigfield explains it a bit better.
(Ben Byram-Wigfield, Author at Scoring Notes)
Dorico is a cross-platform app, and different OSes have different ways of listing fonts.
On Windows, all fonts are grouped together into ‘families’ that always have only four fixed styles: Regular, Italic, Bold and Bold Italic. Typefaces that have any other styles — e.g. Condensed, SemiBold, Black, Light, Extended — appear as separate families, each with its four styles. Windows will synthesize Bold and Italic styles for which no font file exists. On MacOS (and iOS), all available styles will appear together in one big family, so SemiCondensed Caption Italic and Regular are both styles of the same typeface. Styles for which there are no font files will not be synthesized.
List of Styles
Dorico 6 now follows the Mac scheme on any platform. This means that you can’t select a Bold style for a typeface that has no bold font file, such as Petaluma Script. It also makes moving projects between platforms (including the iPad) more reliable, and Dorico is now better at dealing with missing styles, particularly when the ‘parent’ typeface is changed in a cascading style. However, Windows users may have to redefine some extended styles in the Missing Fonts dialog when they first open a project — though Dorico will then ‘remember’ that choice for other projects with the same fonts.
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Will this mapping work for all charts?
Thank you
Any time you open a project that was last saved in an earlier version, if Dorico sees fonts it doesn’t know about, it will show the Missing Fonts dialog. However, as the post above indicates, once you have indicated for one project that instead of Foo Bold you want to use Bar Regular, the next time you open a project that uses Foo Bold the dialog will be pre-populated with Bar Regular as the replacement – so you only have to hit OK, not re-select all the substitutions.