Text frame spacings (leading)

[joonas]

Hi!

I am sad to learn that (at least in the latest Dorico 5) one cannot manage the leading of fonts with pt-s, only with percentages. Ok, there is text next to it that tells you the equivalent in pt-s.

But it seems that the leading settings to not make the correct spacings at all…I have an engrave’ing guide that I am trying to follow. Let’s take one example - the composer and arranger texts. I tried to fit everything in the screenshot - the guide, my Composer paragraph style that my text is using, and the result in Dorico.

The space between the texts is quite much wider than the guide.

Also another interesting problem:

I have in one frame “dedication”, “title” and “subtitle” with all different sizes and paragraph styles. (The spaces between them are also too big, but there is another problem also). First screenshot shows all text tokens filled in in Project Info:

The second one is taken after I deleted the word “dedication” from the Project Info (the token still remains):

In all cases the frame is set to align everything to the “top”. But removing the dedication text shifts everything down…?

Thank you for your time

Joonas

[dan_kreider]

I have wanted proper line leading forever. I had several projects last few years that were very specific in their typographic requirements, and it was very difficult to get right, because the percentages are not correct in the little calculator beside the number in the paragraph style. Hopefully this is on the list.

[joonas]

Do you have a workaround/fix for it currently?

I mean…using a frame for each text and somehow defining the millimeters there? The conversion from specific font points to mm is maybe also not the most accurate…

[dan_kreider]

No, because Dorico keeps descenders inside the text frame, so it is not baseline-aligned.

I achieved it by setting a background grid to my desired leading and nudging the percentage until it looked right, then turning off the grid.