I just set a new music font for a project, and found that the notehead size in Engraving Options, which I had previously set to Larger Noteheads, had changed to Default Noteheads. What else gets changed? Is there a comprehensive list of changes that are made to a project when music fonts are changed? (I can always use the Library Manager, I suppose, but I’d like to read up on this in whatever documentation exists.)
When setting the new music font, I deselected both checkboxes, the options for updating text fonts and using recommended engraving options.
Can you tell more about which Fonts are you switching from/to, and possibly post a Dorico project that shows this issue (with the steps to reproduce the issue)?
I believe this happens because when you select “Larger noteheads” in Engraving Options, Dorico will always use Bravura, regardless of the selected default music font. This has been discussed previously.
In terms of other things, as long as you have deselected both boxes, very little gets changed; basically things relating to font/paragraph/character styles.
If you tick the box that says “Use recommended engraving options”, then a number of engraving options relating to spacing and line thicknesses also get changed. Exactly which ones depends on which font you choose.
(You can see which engraving defaults each font will change by examining its metadata json file. These are located (on Windows) in a fonts/metadata folder Program Files/Steinberg/Dorico6. If you also have older versions of Dorico installed, these metadata files may be read from one of those locations instead.)
I don’t think this is the case. Dorico 6 uses larger noteheads from the selected music font if this font includes a glyph at uniF4BE. If it doesn’t, it will fall back to Bravura.
I think I read somewhere that Dorico’s default is “larger noteheads.” If so (and someone please correct me if this is wrong), changing from larger to default would not really make a difference!
— Jim
[EDIT:] Well, that was redundant; I didn’t see the post from @SugarFree!
“Default” has two different meanings here. The SMuFL spec says that noteheads should be one space tall; those are the default noteheads within a font. But when you choose Bravura as your music font, by default Dorico will use the larger noteheads defined in the font.
Thanks for the input, everyone. The font I installed for this project was Nor Bahha’s beautiful Vintage Plate. There is no associated .json file in the Dorico program files. I did use the Library Manager to compare the project before and after switching music fonts, and here’s the comprehensive list of what changed.
Engraving Options: Notehead design got switched from Larger Noteheads to Default Noteheads.
Font Styles: The Default Music, Dynamic Music Text, Figured Bass, Fingering, Multi-bar Rest Bar Count, Time Signature, and Tuplet Fonts all were altered, and a new Font Style simply called Vintage Plate was created.
Glyph Primitives: hundreds of new glyph primitives were created, seemingly one for every possible notehead; a good example is noteheadCircledBlack, which according to the Library Manager did not exist in the project before I changed the music font. A very few glyph primitives such as noteheadBlackOversized were modified from existing ones. In the few modified ones, “Font style name” and “Font used in style” match (both Bravura before the switch, both Vintage Plate afterwards), while each of the hundreds of new primitives show “Default Music Font” for “Font style name” and Vintage Plate only for “Font used in style.”
Multi-segment lines: the “Repeat offsets” of the Multi-segment wiggled trill line have been altered.
Noteheads: similar to Glyph Primitives — many new entries and a few modifications of existing items.
Repeatable symbols: similar to Glyph Primitives — many new entries and a few modifications of existing items.
Each of these, except the change to Engraving Options, seems like a proper update to my project, as they’re all items that would naturally look different with a music font change. The file size is also only 100kb larger than before. I wonder, though, what happens if I delete these hundreds of “new” glyph primitives, since they seem redundant? Surely noteheadCircledBlack existed in Bravura.
One of the disadvantage that third party SMuFL fonts have comparing to Bravura, is that any time you switch to a third party music font, the noteheads will change to default noteheads (narrow).
That was the only change I saw in the Library Manager that created a problem. Thankfully it was the only alteration made to Engraving Options, and mercifully it’s easy to fix.
Related to your original question, here are the engraving settings included in SMuFL fonts. However, Dorico doesn’t use all of them when changing the music font.
