OK I’m writing in lyrics in English but with a second verse in Spanish. I’ve figured out a lugubrious way to make them into italics with Properties, but I would like to find a way to access the non-english diacrital characters like German umlaut or Spanish/French accents over the letter “E”. This was kinda hamfisted in Finale, but possible depending on the text font. Is there a solution that doesn’t send me down the rabbit hole of unicode?
2nd query. Is it possible to have different fonts in different lyric verses? That might lead to a solution of the 1st query.
Dorico doesn’t have any magic to make this easier; you get accented characters in Dorico the same way you would in any other program. (Although, yes, some apps like Word do have their own shortcuts built in.)
On Windows, I keep this app running in the background. It makes it pretty simple to “compose” a whole bunch of characters with just a few keystrokes. ü, for example, is RightCtrl"u; È is RightCtrl`E. (I have RightCtrl set as my “trigger” key; it’s configurable.)
This is based on a utility in Linux, so I’m sure there’s something similar on Mac.
On Mac there are standard key commands to add all the normal diacritical markings in any program. And a font either supports them or it doesn’t. Dorico recognizes these commands just like every other software. So just google the key commands and you’re off to the races.
As for different fonts for different verses, yes, this is very easily done. Create more than one paragraph style, then select a word from the line of lyrics that you want to change, use the “select more” command to get the rest of the line, and then assign the newly created paragraph style to that line. Easy. Takes less than a minute start to finish.
I find the easiest way to do this in Windows is to add the International keyboard to your system in settings. Switch between keyboards by pressing shift + ctrl. Then something like é is entered by pressing the apostrophe key then the e key. For ü, press the quote key then the u key. The various key combinations are well documented at various websites, just search for it.
There are virtually no (text) fonts without the diacritics to type Spanish or German, and hardly any (Latin-based) computer keyboards not capable of producing them somehow. Just explore the keyboard options of your operating system.
Dorico provides a “translation” type for lyric lines, which by default is italics. You can input directly into a translation line for any line number, or retrospectively make lyrics “translations” using the Properties panel.
OK tried to achieve this but changing paragraph style to another font did nothing, still appears in the default font. I know that my chosen default lyric font doesn’t support diacriticals, so the translated lyric needs to be another font, I thought maybe Times New Roman, which has a full load of diacriticals, ideally in italics hopefully. What am I missing? It’s apparent to me that Dorico requires one to do exact choices that I still don’t really know, so a step by step process would be appreciated.
Yes I selected a section of lyric and tried to change it. Default lyric font is Broadway Copyist (maybe the old Finale fonts point to the problem?). But even though the window says I’ve changed to a different font it still retains the the default.
This should be a solution but it’s dependent on the default lyric font apparently. If the default font doesn’t have diacriticals it produces garbage. I really think I have to search for different fonts as I continue my migration from Finale, specifically an equivalent to Finale Jazz. I don’t much like Petaluma as an alternative handwritten font.
Create a new PARAGRAPH style and SAVE IT. In this example, I’ve made a new one named “Lyrics (DIFFERENT)”. This image is before I assign this paragraph style:
Romanos thank you I carefully followed your process with some approximate success. I created a paragraph style for lyrics in Times New Roman (which has the diacriticals I was looking for). Made a second style that’s italic and added Spanish and French keyboards to the keyboard viewer successfully. So I could add things in a different alphabet with the character viewer… But using this paragraph style changes the the first (English) verse into italicized in the new keyboard setup for both lyrics. I can lugubriously highlight lyric syllables and change them to italics, butI want that 1st verse in English, the 2nd in French or Spanish in italics. Gotta be a step I’m missing.
