Typography - suggestions

Dorico
1

  1. In my opinion, the dialogs that appear if you select the first five menu-entries under “Engrave” should be modeless like some other dialogs found in Dorico. If you are tweaking your fonts / styles / spacing it is quite uncomfortable to close and reopen the dialog every time you want to apply a change.

  2. Maybe those dialogs could have a similar hierarchy based structure like the “engraving-option dialog”? For me it’s a bit confusing that everything seems to be on the same “level”.

  3. I don’t really understand why there is a “font-style setting dialog” and a “character-style settings dialog”. Maybe someone can help me?

  4. I’d be glad to have a font/paragraph-style option to display uppercase letters. (e.g. useful if you want staff-labeling to be in uppercase letters). This is often found in jazz-publications.

THX!

2

I agree that the split between font styles and paragraph/character styles is perhaps not as clear as it could be. Font styles are intended to be used for things that Dorico draws itself, things like notes, clefs, tempos, dynamics, etc.; paragraph and character styles are for text items and the contents of text frames. There is a bit of overlap currently, and over time our intention is to migrate more text-like things (tempos, dynamics, etc.) from using font styles to using paragraph styles (as we did in Dorico 2 for bar numbers).

3

There is a setting in Engraving Options > Staff Labels to display them in either Upper case or Title case. However, I’d agree that an option in the Paragraph Styles would be nice, so that other items, e.g. Titling and headers, could be forced into Upper Case. Or even Small Caps!

4

Thanks for your reply, benwiggy- The setting “Engraving Options > Staff Labels” affects vocal staves only, I’m afraid…
So, as you also said, would be nice to have the option to set Upper Case oder Small Caps for any paragraph style.

5

Maybe to help make more sense of this, Font styles should be renamed to Music Styles? Just a thought. I think that would help make things a little clearer.

Robby