Apparently applying some non-factory Playback Templates will change Font Styles/Default Text Font to Academico 10pt. As I can’t find any font settings in the Playback Template dialog box, this is quite unexpected.
Change Font Styles/Default Text Font to anything other than Academico, change the size to anything other than 10pt.
In Play/Playback Template select one of the third-party templates (BBC SO, VSL, etc.) other than NotePerformer. It must be different from the currently active Playback Template too. Hit “Apply and Close.”
Go back and check Font Styles/Default Text Font. Whatever you previously selected has now been changed to Academico 10pt.
I was trying a few different VST libraries for a mockup for a client, and almost sent him a PDF with the wrong fonts when I discovered this, ugh! Playback Templates should not have any effect on fonts, should they? Can anyone else confirm this?
I’ve taken a look at the code to see what Dorico is doing, and it will import any entities that are included in the .doricolib files that are part of the playback template, which is where the expression maps, percussion maps, playing techniques and playback techniques are specified.
My guess is that there may be some new text-based playing techniques specified in one or more of the playback templates that use the default text font style, and Dorico will indeed import this style from the playback template library file if it’s found there. So this is the expected behaviour, even if it’s not always desirable!
I’ll look into changing things such that it will not import any library items that are factory supplied, e.g. things like default font styles, so that it will import the playing techniques but they will end up using whatever the default font style looks like in the destination project.
Thanks, this would be great! I guess I’d love to be able to use Playback Templates as a way to try out different VST libraries on project, without worrying about any “house style” elements like fonts changing inadvertently too. If this change won’t occur until a future 4.x release, it might be useful to document the possibility of having your default font style changed, as I imagine this would be unexpected behavior for most users. The word font doesn’t appear anywhere in the documentation under Playback Templates or any of its sublinks.
Reviving this thread as I discovered it in a search while trying to research this issue. I usually do a lot of custom music & font/paragraph styles, which I am noticing are being completely flushed/reset back to Bravura & Academico when I switch playback templates (which doesn’t really make sense, given that should only affect playback). Would definitely love to see it fixed in a future update, thank you!
I’d like to echo the previous posts and confirm that this issue persists in the latest version of Dorico Pro 5 (5.1.70.2200). Reproducing the problem is straightforward and seems to have no easy solution other than manually resetting fonts. For example, the stunning Musical Theatre templates produced by NYC Music Services and available from notationcentral.com and the Dorico supplied Big Band template are corrupted (font selection changed) after importing Straight Ahead’s Atomic Big Band playback template. It seems very counterintuitive that a playback template should change or influence a project’s fonts without any notification - it took me several hours before I realised what was going on and to discover this thread. It would be extremely helpful if this could be addressed in a future version of the software.
Dorico is currently behaving as designed here. When you apply a playback template, that playback template includes not only endpoint configurations, expression maps, and percussion maps, but also information about all of the different types of data referenced by those items. Expression maps, for example, can reference playback techniques, which are used by playing techniques. Playing techniques reference font styles, line styles, and so on.
There is a complex tree of dependencies for the data required for a playback template, and it is non-trivial to determine whether or not the data included with the playback template should take precedence over the data that already exists in the project to which you’re applying the playback template.
At the moment, we err on the side of importing the data from the playback template library data. For things like font styles (which are included because they are referenced by playing techniques and also by percussion instrument presentation data), this is not always desirable.
We have on our backlog some remaining work to consider whether we can further refine this logic to minimise the visual impact of importing or applying a playback template. It is not possible to guarantee in general that no element of your project will change appearance after applying a playback template, but we can surely refine it further.
Could you please consider at least adding a little warning text about this behaviour when changing playback template?
It was a bit stressful for me in the middle of the last project, where all of my custom noteheads disappeared (seemingly randomly) - only now I realize it happened after resetting the noteperformer playback template. Luckily the library manager was the “saving angel” there - I could import the noteheads from an earlier version of my project.