Typing a brace in the music

How can I get a brace, {, in Dorico and place it “where I want it” in the music? I can access it in Word;

image

but I cannot type it in Dorico. Any advice how to do it would be appreciated.

You don’t type them at all. Dorico draws them by default on appropriate staves such as Piano, but if you want them drawn differently there are settings. Start here in the User Guide and follow links for methods of changing them.

First check out “Brackets according to ensemble type” and if that doesn’t do it, there are explanations and a tutorial video at “Custom staff grouping”.

I explained it poorly I see now. I want to do this

Oh, ignore my first reply then! I guess one way to do that is type { in your text item, make it bigger, and offset the baseline.

Probably a better way is to insert the music character U+E000 which is a nice-looking brace for this type of thing. After you type “Gt”, right-click to get a context menu, choose Insert Music Text …, and search for “brace”.

There are also unicode characters for multi-line braces



but wrangling these can be tricky.

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I only seem to get “Arial” when I type something in Bravura;

Yes, that’s because the Bravura font doesn’t have most of the ascii characters. I edited my 2nd reply, above.…

Registration Text Brace

I did this by inserting the character from Bravura (as in post #4 above), making it 30pt and shifting its baseline down 8pt.

Excellent. Thank you. Can I define character styles and apply these to “Gt” and { independently and get quick formatting? Manual tweaking works as well, with C/P, but styles are more elegant.

My approach would be to copy the marking to the next place with Alt-click and change the text where necessary.

We can assign a Paragraph Style to a whole text block, but I don’t think we can apply Font Styles to characters within a text block.

My suggestion would be to create a custom playing technique, then Save as Default to make it available in other projects. Lots of control over the size and positioning of multiple glyphs.

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I thought character styles would handle this, but I can be wrong.

An interesting idea. I have not looked into that yet (beginner) but will do so.