Parenthesized and bracketed dynamics

Is it possible to edit the size and position of parentheses and brackets placed around dynamics by means of: Bottom panel>Dynamics>Parenthesized or Prefix and Suffix?

Probably not in a way that will satisfy you, no: they are added using the ‘Dynamic text font’, which you can edit in Engrave > Font Styles (be sure to spot the difference between ‘Dynamic music text font’ and ‘Dynamic text font’), but of course any edit you make there will also change the size/font etc. of any other text you specify as a prefix or suffix. The ones that appear when you click ‘Parenthesized’ are not drawn using that font, however: they’re drawn using dedicated glyphs in Bravura, and you can edit those if you wish in Engrave > Music Symbols.

Thank you, Daniel. Which parentheses in the list of Music Symbols are used for dynamics? The ones specified “for hairpin”?

I had also thought of creating playing techniques for these. Or modifying some of the dynamic signs I never use. Is this advisable?

In fact the parentheses used for immediate dynamics are the ones from the font specified in ‘Dynamic Text Font’, while the ones in the Music Symbols dialog are, per their description, for hairpins.

You could certainly override the appearance of one of the dynamics you don’t use in Music Symbols to look however you like. Obviously they’ll have a contrary effect on playback, but you can ‘Mute’ them in the Common group of Properties.

Thanks, Daniel. Playback is not a concern, so this could work for me.

I decided to add the bracketed and parenthesized dynamics as new Playing Techniques. Is it possible to use italicized glyphs in this editor? I only see the regular ones in the lists.

Yes. You can add them as text, not glyphs.

But maybe better to simply add as text popover, and turn off collision avoidance. Then you can vary the distance between the brackets as needed.

Thanks, dankreider. I am adding alternative fingering in the text popover, and soon learned why the collision avoidance has to be turned off when I added underscores as small separators! But I have found it too laborious to add brackets and parentheses in the popover because of spacing issues.

How does one add the brackets and parentheses in italics in the Playing Techniques editor as text? I can only add text in regular type.

And is there documentation explaining how the Playing technique and Music Symbol editors work? I can’t find that anywhere.

When you create a playing technique as text, from the dropdown, select “dynamic text font.”

Here’s a tutorial on the editor: How to Use the Playing Techniques Editor in Dorico Pro | Getting Started with Dorico 2 - YouTube

Thanks, dankreider. In the meantime, I had found that font.tupletplain worked. Maybe it’s the same font as font.dynamictext. I did it all within the glyph editor since it is a composite of a glyph and text. The results are excellent. I can now add all the missing glyphs I need in the Playing Techniques panel and specify the popover commands, which is terrific. But I couldn’t find a way to add them to the Dynamics panel, where they would be more appropriate. Am I missing something?

For what I was doing it was unfortunate that Style keeps defaulting to font.barnumber after every insertion of a text character in the glyph editor. And I can’t find the font for each character and glyph displayed whenever it is selected in the editor. So if I come back later I won’t be able to tell what font was used.

The dynamics panel can’t be edited, only the playing techniques panel.

You can create custom text styles and assign a key command to them, so that key command will summon whatever specific text style you have pre-selected.

I just found that font.barnumber, the default for Style, actually gives italics, which makes some of this much easier. I think I missed that because the characters don’t display in italics in the small window under Style.

I definitely need to use key commands for text styles. Thanks for the tip, dankreider! And I need to assign key commands for a lot of other operations as well in Keyboard Maestro.

Yes, the fact that all the panels can’t be edited puzzles me. And why the panels cannot be detached and reshaped is also puzzling. Perhaps these are future additions. I certainly hope so.

Tip: in order to expose a newly-created paragraph style to a key command, you’ll need to select it and set as default, then set the original default back again. Only then will it appear in the key command list, when you search “text.”

Thanks for the tip. That does not sound very “intuitive”…

Daniel’s explanation: https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=246&t=128347&p=822296&hilit=default+text+command#p822386