Off topic - Help with this notation

Dorico
1

I am working on engraving a public domain piece for my own personal enjoyment. I have come across this in the Oboe part:

Screenshot 2025-04-30 at 14.20.42
Screenshot 2025-04-30 at 14.20.42988×270 17.1 KB

I am understanding this to mean “1st Solo”. However, I am not sure what that second glyph is, and am wondering if this is still an acceptable form of the abbreviation.

I know this group is full of truly smart people (more so than I am) and was hoping someone could shed some light on this for me.

Thanks in advance,
Robby

2

My guess is that they put there both a small superscript “o”, and a dot.

  • The superscript “o” after the “1” (1º) is short for “Primo” in Italian.
  • The dot is more mysterious; I’ve sometimes seen in French the equivalent superscript underlined (like in “1re”)*, and maybe they did it, but the ink expanded too much.
  • Note: I can’t make the underline appear in markdown, sorry.
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How dare you bring up a topic that isn’t directly linked to Dorico 6.

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@DanielMuzMurray How dare I respond! SmileyFace smaller
@Robby_Poole The lower case O with a dot underneath has the Unicode code point of U+1ECD, and its Unicode “name” is LATIN SMALL LETTER O WITH DOT BELOW.

In the attached Dorico project, I have input some staff-attached text with various versions of what appeared in your image above.

Dotted o ex's
Dotted o ex's1732×626 68.8 KB

The first instance is what it looks like without any modifications, apart from setting the font size to 12 point.
The second instance had the following changes made:

  1. Bold applied to all characters except for the dotted o.
  2. The dotted o was set to 9 point, and had a baseline shift of 3.5 pt applied (applying superscript is also an option for this step).
  3. The 1 was selected and had a letter spacing of -1.0 pt applied.

The third instance had the following changes made:

  1. Bold applied to all characters except for the dotted o.
  2. The dotted o was set to 12 point, and had a baseline shift of 2.0 pt applied.
  3. The 1 was selected and had a letter spacing of -1.0 pt applied.

Hopefully this will give you some ideas.
Of course, the font is not the same, but you might find that other fonts do not include the dotted o character.

Dotted o examples.dorico (569.3 KB)

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Thank you!

You guys answered what I wanted! Thanks for the help and the suggestions.

Robby

6

Notation and typography are never off-topic!

I’d say it’s fairly rare in most commercial fonts. TBH, I wouldn’t bother replicating this: just use a normal º.

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Thank you, Ben. Sorry it took me a few days to respond, I’ve been busy.

I appreciate everyone’s expertise and knowledge.

Robby