I’ve run into a situation I’ve not seen before, probably because bordered paragraph styles are a fairly recent addition. With the settings below, I’d expect to have a ludicrous amount of space above {@layoutName@} and very little space below, but Dorico’s attempting to center the text between the borders (and failing, because Palatino’s metrics don’t match Academico’s).
How do you know it’s the font metrics?
I assume you are on a Mac because you have Palatino. The only remotely useful thing I could add is that Palatino is a very old font and maybe it lacks some necessary modern metrics. What happens if you try other Mac built in fonts? I can’t replicate as I am on Windows 11. Or indeed Palatino from another foundry?
On a possibly related topic, today I edited some system text to be centre aligned and the position of the whole text box jumped over to the left margin. I can repeat this on demand. It’s unexpected, to me anyway. I would have thought the box would obediently stay put. But this may be the topic for another post.
In general, Dorico is doing the right thing here. Certainly it’s got nothing to do with Dorico assuming that it should always be using Academico’s metrics. When I was working on this, I did of course check a bunch of different fonts, and I find that broadly speaking everything works pretty well. Fonts like Futura, Helvetica Neue, Arial, Bodoni 72, Cochin, Didot, Baskerville, Geneva, Lucida Grande, Lato, etc. etc. all produce perfectly good results without any tweaking.
But certainly a handful of fonts I have on my system produce results that would need a bit of tweaking: Minion Pro and Chaparral Pro are quite asymmetrical, while Palatino isn’t perfect but it’s not dreadful.
All of these produce the same results regardless of the vertical alignment settings of the frame, as I would expect.
For some fonts, you may well have to use the provided tools in the Paragraph Styles dialog to adjust the amount of padding around the border. It should be easy enough to do.
Same meaning they all put the padding where it’s set to go, regardless of the vertical alignment settings of the frame? Or same meaning they all respect the vertical alignment settings in a way that is perhaps a little puzzling to a slightly addled user?
I expected the border padding to be consistently relative to the text, given it’s a property of the Paragraph Style, and in my first screenshot it isn’t.
Yes, I would expect the border placement, regardless of its actual size relative to the font, to be consistent whatever frame vertical alignment is chosen, and on my Mac here using Palatino, it is.
