Music Symbol Fonts in Adobe Illustrator 2019

I am creating some course materials in Adobe Illustrator 2019. Previously, when using (he who must not be named) Finale, I had access to the Maestro font which allowed me to input accidentals into my text in Illustrator. I am struggling to do this with Dorico 3. When I select Petaluma Text Regular (which I assume is the default Dorico music symbol font), it immediately reverts back to the previously selected font. Can anyone shed some light on this please? Many thanks.

Unlike Maestro, the Dorico fonts don’t contain “ASCII” range A to Z characters. So # and n and b aren’t the characters used for accidents. If you’re selecting those characters, then Illustrator might think “that font can’t be used with that character”.

Standard accidental characters can be found here: Browse the glyphs | SMuFL

(Note that you can copy and paste the actual glyph.)

NB: Petaluma Text is for adding musical symbols in text: it’s not the Music Font that Dorico uses (which is ‘just’ Petaluma).

If you are on Mac I can recommend Ultra Character Map (App Store)
You can copy glyphs and paste them into Illustrator/Affinity Designer as images or text.
Even support Standard Music Font Layout.

Jesper

Use Bravura Text for all music symbols in AI, then open the Glyphs panel (Window/Text/Glyphs). There you can scroll through every character in the font and double-click to add one to your text.

No need for any 3rd party app, you can even copy directly from FontBook, but you can also copy glyphs directly from AI/Typography/Glyph.