Solved: adding flat/sharp signs to part layout names

Dorico
1

At the risk of redundancy, I thought I’d post this on its own thread to summarize, in the hopes that it may benefit other users. If I’m wrong about any of the info below, somebody set me straight and I’ll update this OP.

I’ve been trying to add a flat sign to my part layout names (Bb clarinets and trumpets, in my case). Supposedly you can just add the glyphs via Unicode. There are two problems:

  • Windows doesn’t do Unicode natively, so I have to find the glyphs and copy-paste them every time
  • My font of choice (Minion Pro) adds a massive gap between the B and the flat sign

I fixed the Unicode problem by assigning flat, natural, and sharp to Ctrl-Alt-Shift-F, N, and S respectively using AHK (I also added Ctrl-Alt-Shift-C for the copyright symbol). Code below.

Mac users can add flat, natural, and sharp by inputting the Unicode: U+266D for flat, U+266E for natural, U+266F for sharp.

For the spacing issue, it seems I have to use Academico for the layout name. I can see it looks spaced out in the layout panel, but it appears correctly in the score (thanks to Craig F for the help!). I would prefer to use Minion Pro for everything, but it’s worth it to me to get the flat sign. Perhaps a future update can automatically generate the layout names with correct transposition symbols, but this works fine in the meantime.

Just posting this in case it’s helpful to anyone else. Here’s the AHK script. It’s nothing profound, but it certainly helps me!

; Shortcuts

^+!f:: Send ♭

^+!n:: Send ♮

^+!s:: Send ♯

^+!c:: Send ©

adding flat glyph.png

2

You could try adding the flat symbol to the Master Page in Engrave mode. There you could set the Flat symbol only to Academico. Of course you would need a new Master Page for instruments that need that symbol.

3

I don’t understand why it displays just fine for the staff labels. I’m using Minion Pro for those.


staff label.png

4

In staff labels, Dorico automatically substitutes the appropriate character from Bravura Text, but that’s not how the tokens work: tokens don’t (currently) allow you to change font, so if the font you use for the layout name doesn’t have a nice flat sign at the right spot, you’ll get whatever substituted character gets chosen.