Playing Techniques Editor Fonts

Dorico
1

In my searches for solutions to fingering charts (specifically for bass clarinet) I’ve come across a pretty good one that is font based, meaning that the font itself includes instrument fingering templates and individual ‘closed’ fingerings that you can type on top of those.
I wanted to streamline the input method for this using the new Playing Techniques editor, so I can create various fingering and assign an intuitive popup to each, i.e. 103406 would correspond to the chart with the 1st, 3rd, 4th and 6th keys closed.
But I couldn’t find a way to do this.

  • Selecting “Text” type only lets you choose from Dorico’s internal Font Styles - no access to general system fonts.
  • Selecting “Glyph” does allow you to access any font but there are several problems with this too:
  1. seems like not all the font characters are there
  2. it would be great to have an input field so one could type in the characters
  3. Even when finding (just one) of the required glyphs, for some reason it appeared much too big to ‘handle’ even in the lowest zoom setting.

Am I missing something or is this not yet (easily) supported?

2

You are not missing anything: at the moment you can’t choose every possible Unicode range of glyphs for the chosen font. Do you happen to know which code points the glyphs are at in the font you’re trying to use?

3

no, sorry - don’t know how to access that info…
another thing is that some of the glyphs seem empty on the palette and only reveal their content once selected…

4

Perhaps you could post a link to the font you’re trying to use, so I can take a look and see what’s up with it?

5

Sure, here it is: http://www.subcontrabassoon.com/legnifont/assets/legniclarinetbass.zip
The zip file includes a PDF with the keyboard layout.
Thanks!

6

I don’t think this font is well-suited for use in the playing techniques editor: it’s clearly meant to be typed in text, so the glyphs that are apparently empty actually just have bits filled in way off in negative space so that after you put in one of the “blank” fingering charts, you could type one of these characters to add it to the diagram and they would superimpose properly.

7

I see. So probably Shift-X is the way to go on this one.
Thanks.