i’m using dorico pro (the trial, i have elements) i’m working on traditional guqin music, and i need to use this font under each note to notate hand techniques, to achieve this (without the numbers on top):
guqin techniques characters are not “real” hanzi, but bits and pieces combined together. so that font works like this: you write a string of letters/hanzi and the font interprets it to “create” the proper symbol.
i tried doing shift+x in dorico to add text under each note and using that font (i even added a custom paragraph/text style for this specific notation) but i have a problem. when i write and i’m in the text box everything is right:
i thought the problem was that, since the “real” string of text comes out to be larger than the final symbol shown, maybe dorico needs to force a new line and that’s why it looks exploded like that. i also tried to edit note spacing in engraving mode (nothing changes) or to reduce letter and word spacing (then the font defaults to the string of text instead of the symbol).
is there a way to hide the "X"s of no time signature and the system break purple labels in write mode? they often get in the way of adding texts and sometimes also inputting notes.
since i’m asking about guqin, is there a way i can also do this?
So you are using advanced Open Type combining features, yes? I am not sure if Dorico supports that. Chinese characters, yes, but on the fly open type constructions, I am not so sure.
Can you use Font Creator or similar to pre-construct the combinations you need? Am I understanding you correctly?
if you mean if the font uses open type, i don’t know. if you mean if in my settings for the text i was trying to input i was using open type, then no but i also tried using it with no avail. i still get the exploded thing.
i didn’t think of using font creator. it could work i’m sure, but i’m not really that tech savvy and i think the single combinations would be too high of a number to easily handle. that font is great because you basically don’t have to remember nothing apart from a few shortcuts
i’ll try looking for jianzipu on the forum. the website i linked has a tool to make guqin scores, but i was interested in making it work in dorico because it’s orders of magnitude quicker, more customizable, and i could potentially score ensembles including guqin (which you can’t do with that tool).
sorry for the double posting, i have tried searching the forum for guqin, jianzipu and jianpu specifically as you suggested.
first two i haven’t gotten any results, but by looking for jianpu i get discussions about another thing which shares a similar name but it’s not what i’m talking about. jianpu seems to mean the numbered notation (shared by all traditional chinese instruments), but guqin’s jianzipu is not the numbers rather specifically the combined symbols i was mentioning earlier, that represent specific guqin exclusive finger techniques.
since guqin scores mainly use jianpu (numbers) + jianzipu (finger techniques), or even only jianzipu, the thing i’m trying to do is making transcriptions as shown in my op except without the numbers, because i don’t like jianpu and i prefer having western notation quickly available for various reasons (studying, analysis, memorization, improv…).
i’ll try tinkering some more with dorico, or maybe i could simply edit the pdf of western notation adding the jianzipu after. i’ll let you know if i find a solution!
