Upgraded machine, Bravura ligatures seem to have changed

I’ve upgraded my computer to a beast (16 core processor, 128gb RAM etc) which has made a small improvement to the performance of Dorico (still takes a few seconds to do anything, but I’m working on a ridiculously large project).

I had faked a few time signature changes in the condensed score (as condensed staves can’t yet handle independent time signatures) by copying and pasting the glyphs from https://w3c.github.io/smufl/gitbook/tables/time-signatures.html into shift+X text popovers and adjusting the size and offset in engrave mode. So far so good.

Having transferred the licence to my new machine and opened the project on my new computer, I notice all the glyphs I had pasted have turned into barred flats (horns should go to 4/4 in the second bar here:):


My only fake time sigs are 12/8 and 4/4. While fiddling and trying to reinput these, I realised that if I copide and pasted the 12/8 glyph from above it would actually produce a 4/4. Has there perhaps been an update to Bravura recently that has swapped a handful of glyphs? Or is there some sort of global setting in Windows that turns on/off extended ligature features? I’ve been googling for hours and am at my wit’s end!

There’s a possibility that there have been some changes to Bravura under the hood - it wouldn’t be the first time. That said, have you restarted your computer since installing Dorico? Sorry if I’m stating the ridiculously obvious, but forgetting to restart does seem to catch out a surprising number of users :wink:

Yup, that was the first thing I tried. Problem still persists.

Ok, definitely has been a bravura change - I had a brainwave, logged in to my old computer and copied the font files over to the new one. Time sigs now working as expected. Phew!

Bear in mind that using an earlier version of Bravura with an updated version of Dorico (for which Bravura was updated) may have some other undesirable consequences.

This is a bit of a complex area.

If you copy and paste the glyphs shown in the ‘Recommend ligatures’ section of the SMuFL web site directly into your Dorico project, that isn’t going to be future-proof, because you’re then copying the specific optional codepoint (in the range U+F400 and up) from Bravura, rather than actually using the codepoints that will produce that ligature using OpenType features. If you want a 2/4 time signature, for example, you must use the codepoints U+E09E and U+E082 for the numerator 2, and U+E09F and U+E084 for the denominator 4, which then produces the appropriate ligature; typically the glyph produced for such a ligature wouldn’t have a code point in the font so that it could only be produced by the sequence of code points intended to produce it, but early in SMuFL development some web-based developers, who often don’t have access to OpenType features, lobbied for every glyph, including optional ligatures, to be given a code point, so we do that. However, the code points in the U+F400+ range are not guaranteed to be stable from one Bravura revision to the next, and that includes the precomposed glyphs that are produced by the code points for time signature ligatures.

So I would recommend typing time signatures using the non-optional code points in the range U+E000 to U+F3FF, as these are guaranteed to be stable and will not change in future versions of the font. The actual glyph produced should always then be correct, regardless of which version of Bravura you’re using.

Thanks for the explanation Daniel - this makes much more sense. I’m having trouble entering hex in Windows - I’ve added the EnableHexNumpad key to the registry as Google suggests, but Alt+[Numplus]+code just starts cycling through Dorico’s menus! It seems to work in other software (e.g. Notepad++), but in that changing the font to Bravura and enabling ligatures doesn’t get the same results as that Smufl page…

I wrote up a couple of options for how to type arbitrary Unicode code points here. Hopefully one of those methods will work for you.