+1
As the wished glyphs are already present in Bravura a possibility until Dorico offers the choice ist to open Bravura in FontForge and to replace the glyph U+E512 (8va) with the glyph U+E51C (8vb) and to replace U+E516 (15ma) with U+E51D (15mb).
I am aware that if you never had to deal with font editing, this can be a kind of challenge, otherwise it takes only a few minutes.
But of course I do think that Dorico should definitely support several choices.
Including the traditional 8va beneath the staff for an octave lower, I hope.
The more choices the better 
The origin of 8va comes straight from Italian, where it is a standard abbreviation for ‘ottava’ (eighth), much as in English we use 1st, 2nd, 3rd … 8th, and has been thus for centuries. The ‘a’ does not stand for ‘alta’. Other forms, such as 8ba and 8vb, are certainly bastardizations from the original – though no less valid.
These alternatives have clearly been used in music for many years, and I don’t think you can ‘put the smoke back in the bottle’. There are always heated discussions about the ‘correct’ term, most of which boils down to the particular experience of the reader – preferences of nation, musical genre, publishing house, etc.
Like many variations in language, I don’t think you can say one is ‘right’ and the others are ‘wrong’, if that’s what people are using. As stated, all the forms are in the SmuFL font set, so at some point, the option should be there to choose them.
FWIW, Gould only mentions 8va, with the position of the symbol and the position of the extensions line indicating the ‘direction’ of the octave. I can only presume that the other forms came into being to emphasise the octave direction more obviously.
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Yes, I am looking forward to more options to choose. (Especially for 8vb)
I have learned it this way and had never seen 8ba before in any published score so far.
Dannemoller wrote it before and I can only agreed to his post.
I absolutely agree. The 8ba thing I have never seen in my life. Still no possibility to change it to 8vb. At the moment I see three sore points:
- 8va/8vb (that’s what I am used to): option to change the text.
- clef changes between two repeat bar lines: options for clef on the right or on the left (this makes sense if i.e. the beginning is treble clef, then comes bass clef, then the repeat. And after the repeat it goes on in treble clef). The clef sandwiched between the repeat barlines is locked out for the second repeat and looks terrible.
- Beaming as discussed here: Beaming over rests - #10 by John_Ruggero - Dorico - Steinberg Forums
My request: If you give us options, these features will be on the level of the rest of the software, which is excellent. With the attitude of “knowing the only correct way” please don’t forget that the people of Bärenreiter, Henle, Breitkopf, Peters etc. are also able to use their brains.
I beg to differ on “Still no possibility to change it to 8vb”.
We now have the music symbols Editor. Go in there, find the 8ba symbol and replace it with the 8vb one (which already exists in Bravura). Takes 10 seconds. Takes a further second to click the star button to save as default.
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Done. Thank you for the hint. So I have to correct myself that there “is really a possibility”…
Excellent! Thanks, Leo.
But then you couldn’t use 8va to indicate the transposition up an octave, could you?
This particular controversy strikes me like the inclusion of “ain’t” in the dictionary. It is wrong, but so common as to be necessary.
I always assumed the error stemmed from people assuming “8va” translated as “8v” = “octave” and “a” = “above”, so it followed that “8vb” would be “octave below.” Of course that is nonsense (as is the Berklee justification), but has become the dominant practice from what I have seen. We have to be flexible, else we would all be talking like Shakespeare. And even the name “Spakespeare” seems to be one of the errors. As I understand it, his name was often actually hyphenated, Shake-speare, or even Shak-speare. If the great Bard can change with the times, so shall we.
Dear cparmerlee,
You should read Leo’s solution in post #28. No problem for I suppose those who will want to use 8vb won’t use 8ba glyph 
Just here to also vocalize my support for the option of having 8vb as an option!
I also want to support the option of having “8vb” which I have seen prevalently (and possibly never “8ba”) I’m working on my first full Dorico score and am appreciative of this wonderful program but a bit disappointed to have to follow its many specific notational preferences without using work-arounds.
Options are always better–there are too many granular notation conventions with legitimate differences of opinion not to offer them.
DSL
I fully support Daniel’s viewpoint on this. It discourages engravers and publishers from using incorrect notation. The result is better engraving, which is the entire point of the software. Hopefully over time “8vb” will fall out of use.
It’s not like this is a crucial feature that is missing. It’s an incorrect abbreviation that isn’t supported, while multiple correct abbreviations are fully supported.
As previously mentioned, this is not difficult to achieve in Dorico. Just go to Engrave/Music Symbols and change it. Takes only a few seconds.
I agree that you should be able to choose between just 8, 8va/8ba, or 8va/8vb as a setting, even though I have known for several years that 8vb is technically wrong. A good analogy is the English word “die” as the singular form of “dice”. So many people are unaware of the singular form that they say “a dice” and enough have used it that the plural “dice” is now acceptable instead of “die” even though it began due to a misunderstanding (“a dice” still sounds wrong to me though, even though it may now be acceptable).
I just looked a couple of Kalmus and Peters editions and both used just 8 with the line.
I realise this post was written a year ago, before version 2, but it’s clear from the way that Dorico is developing that limited functionality is introduced first to cover most ‘standard’ needs, and greater flexibility and control is introduced at a later stage. I don’t think anyone should worry about constraints in Dorico, in the long term.
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Thanks pianoleo for the tip about making that change to 8vb in the Engrave options. I had to do a little figuring out but made it work.
Pretty phenomenal program!