I’m dissatisfied with all the options for Large Time Signatures. Setting the Layout Option to Plain Font should provide more options, but it doesn’t appear to have control over the typography. In Sibelius you can use Avenir Next Condensed with excellent results by controlling the width, but I can’t find a width control for the Plain Font in Dorico. Am I missing something. Here’re two screenshots of the difference in the quality of large time signatures you can get in Sibelius and Dorico.
The Sibelius version is considerably better than the Dorico version. And notice how the stem on the 4’s in the Sibelius (using Avenir Next Condensed) are shorter and a lot nicer therefore.
I think you’re right that you can’t control the width of the Tim Signature Plain Font. That control is available for paragraph styles, but not for font styles.
Dorico has seemed to be changing more and more of its text items from Font Styles to Paragraph Styles. Perhaps this will change too. When? No one can say.
FWIW, I think Dorico’s “Narrow, Sans Serif” setting is pretty distorted and ugly too. I had played around with a quite a few different Plain fonts for these in the past without being really happy with any of them. Currently I’m using Interstate Compressed Light, which isn’t quite as space efficient, but at least doesn’t look distorted.
The other thing you need control over is the spacing over each of the two-digit numbers. The 16 and 64 for example shouldn’t have the same spacing.
Yesterday I was in the process of replacing the glyphs for the plain font music symbols with my own svg versions and it was working beautifully until I tried it with a two-digit number. Without control over the placement of the second number, it was out of both the vertical and horizontal alignment.
This is the 4/4 example. A little thicker and more balanced than the usual look of large time sigs. Obviously I’d like to bring the whole thing up about 1/8th of a space, and the bottom 4 by half a space, but there’s no control for that either.
You can control the vertical gap between the digits by going to Library > Engraving Options > Time Signatures > Gaps > Vertical Gaps and changing the value of Gap between numerator and denominator for large time signatures. Note that this value can be negative.
Most fonts have tabular spacing for their numerals, so that each numeral takes up the same amount of horizontal space; this is so that numbers will line up when presented in tables.
I understand your point about not wanting them to line up in this case. I haven’t played much with Open Type capabilities, but I believe that some fonts come with alternate proportional numerals that you can activate in the Font Style dialog.
