I’d like to create a parenthesized trill ‘(tr)’ symbol with a small ‘flat’ sign above it. As far as I have been able to find out, there’s no ‘official’ way of parenthesizing trills, and the suggestion is to create a Playing Technique. I encountered two problems:
I created a Playing Technique which displays ‘(tr)’. However, there’s no ‘Ornament Font’ on the list of available fonts and I don’t know which of the myriad options to choose to get the one which Dorico uses to display its own ‘tr’ symbol. (I don’t want to guess, I wish I was able to find this out…)
I don’t know how to get my Playing Technique to display the small ‘flat’ symbol above ‘(tr)’.
Assuming you’re using Bravura, Dorico’s standard music font, that single font contains everything you need.
Create a new playing technique.
Set the type to Glyph, not Text.
Click the pencil to edit the glyph.
Delete the default text by selecting and clicking the trash icon.
From the glyph section on the right side of the Edit Playing Technique dialog you can access all the Bravura folders. They’re well organised but there are lots of them. It might be easier to search Common ornaments - Standard Music Font Layout (SMuFL) for what you want (I found this specific page by using the search box in the top left corner for “trill”), then note down the relevant category and jump straight to it within the Dorico Edit Playing technique dialog. Alternatively, find the actual glyph you want, on the website I just linked to, then note down its Unicode, switch back to Dorico and set the Unicode range accordingly.
Note that on the page I linked to there are stylistic alternatives that include a tr with a flat above. You can use this one; you don’t need to build it from a tr glyph and a separate flat glyph.
Using the list you provided I found the symbol I want parenthesized in the ‘Recommended ligatures’ section. However, there’s no ‘Ligatures’ or ‘Recommended Ligatures’ section available in ‘Edit Playing Technique → SMuFL → Ranges’. So, I guess, Unicode should be the way to go.
The symbol is labelled as ‘uniE260_uniE566’, being a composite of two Unicode symbols. (It’s also called ‘ornamentTrillFlatAbove’, but what is the way of using this information? The ‘Composite’ list does not feature anything by that name, and I don’t see a way of inputting it in some search box…) I can only (I think) search for one of these at the same time. So I searched for both of them, inserted them into the grid and scaled the flat symbol somewhat. However, I have no idea how to add the parentheses.
Of course I would prefer to find the ‘uniE260_uniE566’ symbol and not scale anything by hand. What is the proper way of doing this?
Thank you very much again!
Edit: OH. Parentheses are also there at U+E26A and U+E26B. So I will fiddle with these 4 symbols. Still, it would be nice to know if there’s an ‘official’ way of combining them without scaling by hand… (to get the size proportion of the flat symbol to the trill symbol to be the same as Dorico’s)
Actually if you want to use the precomposed ligatures it’s a little trickier. I’m not sure whether you’re on Mac or Windows, but here on Mac it’s easy enough to switch keyboard layouts to the Unicode Hex Input keyboard. The following instructions will only work if you’ve done so (or if you’ve got another method to drop Unicode characters straight into the text field).
From the Text section, rather than the glyph section, I select the font.Bravura Style, then put the cursor into the box, hold Alt(Opt) and type E260E566. Then I click the Add Text button. Dorico displays a single object.
It may be easier to just grab the glyphs and combine them yourself.
Great! Thanks again! I wouldn’t have occurred to me to use the ‘text’ field in this way (I gathered it was a field to input text to be displayed by the Playing Technique)
