I was literally going to suggest almost exactly the same thing. Great minds?..
Interesting, @Mark_Johnson . I will have to try the 1/2-space L-shift. Thanks for the suggestion.
Hi all,
This question is related to the original I wrote but is regarding tempo text. See below:
Obviously, the ffl looks yuck. Does anyone have a suggestion to get around this? Is it bad form to use a completely different font for tempo text vs title/composer/etc?
What font is that? Yuck.
An old favourite: Academico…
If you can enter this as System text, you can select the lowercase L and increase the word spacing to 0.5, which will break the ligature:
Alternatively, you could use a font editing program to delete the ffl ligature completely.
1 Like
Thanks Dan. I find the letters still collide slightly.
It’s not a massive deal - I know that the client won’t really mind as it’s not for publication - but I don’t like it.
I appreciate your input.
Have I gone round the bend thinking that this shouldn’t be a problem to begin with?
Academico has ligatures for a number of pairs like fi, fl, etc. It’s not at all uncommon for fonts to have these ligatures, and I don’t think Academico’s are egregious (though of course I’m biased, since I was the person who built the font). In a future version of Dorico, once we have access to OpenType features via the Qt framework, it will be possible to disable ligatures if required.
1 Like
Another method to disable the ligature is insert U+200C zero width non-joiner (or other non-spacing codepoint in that range) between the f and l.
1 Like
I’ve never understood the U+… thing. What is it?
Unicode. On a Mac you can select Unicode Hex Input from keyboard preferences and select that as your input language if you want to insert unicode symbols which are always formatted with a U+ a number and a letter. I don’t seem to need to use it much with Dorico anymore…in fact, I haven’t used it for ages. I would just use a different font for your tempo text.
A couple of pages from unicode.org:
Musical symbols: https://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U1D100.pdf
I’ve haven’t done much directly with unicode, @DanielMuzMurray, but I did invoke it for adding some percussion pictograms as playing techniques. It’s also the way to get symbols like Hauptstimme, Nebenstimme, etc.
1 Like