I think we need to expand font style support for lyrics. There are use cases like theater and liturgical music where some specific lyric styles are needed— often on a single-word/syllable basis— and I’d love to see the following options in the Lower Zone at least in Engrave:
Bold (very useful as a guide for accented syllables in unmetered text)
Italic (already there in some cases, I know)
Underline
Overline (another accent tool)
All Caps
Small Caps (this one’s huge in my business, as it is required to present the word “Lord” as such in most Old Testament passages, including psalm texts)
Strikethrough (an option for academic use, e.g., creating a comparative example of two editions)
These are all things that would indeed be terribly useful. This is why I have to take all my scores into affinity publisher st the moment.
Made me chuckle
I have to tell you that I chuckled when I first read your user name. In what I can only assume to be some sort of Freudian slip, I read it as “tony war darts” and not “tony ward arts”.
This reminds me a bit of the joke in bobs burgers where they have the “warf arts center” on the beach, but Gene calls it the “war farts center”.
We had an interesting thread about exactly this, this week (look for open type). Providing your font has small caps embedded in the unicode, you don’t need anything more (Minion pro and Linux Libertine O are working solutions)
Ok now I have to ask, because I’m looking right now and coming up short on the whole Internet: at what Unicode points in Linux Libertine O are the small caps?
I guess I’m unaware of how to apply those unicode IDs to lyrics in Dorico (Mac). For now, I created a TextExpander snippet which inserts the word “Lord” with proper small caps.
Just to say that as of Dorico version 4.2, most of the original requests have been catered for, with the exception of explicit All Caps and Small Caps as style parameters.
You can of course just use CAPS; or a font that has a Small Caps style variant; or use the unicode glyphs for the small caps chars in the font. Using a glyph browser/selector like PopChar is probably essential for this.
Hey, I managed to find it myself: they’re in code points E051 and up. Cycle through hexadecimally: so E059 is followed by E05A, E05B, etc. until E05F, which is followed by E060, E061, etc.
You want to enable the Unicode Hex Input “keyboard” in System Preferences > Keyboard > Input Sources. Then, when you want to enter a hex code, switch to the Unicode Hex Input input method. Hold down Option and press the hex code, one key at a time. Release Option and vous y êtes.
Well, at least on macs, the common accents of éèêë (you can apply the accents to any vowel) with simple commands that don’t require switching to the special Unicode keyboard. Alt u will enable the umlaut, for instance, which will then apply to whichever vowel you click next. Alt e(e) gives you é and Alt e(a) gives you á, etc.
Most characters in a modern text font will be mapped to well-defined Unicode codepoints. It’s a standard, after all. But unlike the standardised codepoints for uppercase, lowercase and their many diacritics for the languages of the world, small caps are not part of the Unicode standard. Some sophisticated fonts may have them on board, but if they don’t simply replace the lowercase glyphs, they’ll be mapped to so-called ‘private’ ranges of Unicode, which are free to use for font creators for characters not covered by the standard. That’s why different font vendors may place small caps at different positions.
In case you are not familiar (there are many shortcuts and tricks that I would love to learn), holding down a key and not releasing on a Mac prompts you for the various diacritics. No need for any keyboard shortcuts or key pairs…
