I am working on a large (for a lack of a better word...) "opera" piece, which, at some point requires Byzantine notation. There is a specialized Byzantine music ensemble involved that needs the specialized notation, and of course, there is the conductor who needs the normal notation. Double notation (Byzantine neums along with European staff notation) is very common in my country, and I'm trying to make (or fake/force) Dorico go in this direction. In Finale this would be done quite easily in the lyrics tool, I used the Lyrics window panel for the introduction of "text" (byzantine neums) and then Click assignment to attach each lets say "syllable" to the corresponding note (by the way, features that I greatly miss in Dorico
but who knows, maybe Dorico's approach is indeed objectively better). This is an example of what I was able to do:
Exemplu Podoleanu.jpg- (205.93 KiB) Not downloaded yet
I experimented a while with the font in Dorico, and I was not able to reproduce this example. The first problem was that I could not change the font within a syllable or lyric line, and then, the font also has some intrinsic blank space below the "character baseline" (I don't know if this is the correct terminology) that messes Dorico's internal spacing algorithm. Of course, I didn't stop there and, in a font editor, I somehow (probably unprofessionally) eliminated the space below all of the characters and that made Dorico properly display the Byzantine notation. GREAT! Now I know it is possible, but I still can't change the font mid-syllable or any other things that are needed for this job. Probably, if I were to dig deeper into this problem, I would eventually find a hack but the reality is that I do not have the skill set necessary to resolve this problem. Perhaps Mr. Daniel Spreadbury (to my knowledge the creator or contributor to SMuFL) may offer a viable solution...
Before I end my post I need to state the following: I am not interested (at least not right now) in reproducing fine aesthetic details of this niche notation. I know this would require perhaps a lot of work from the Dorico team, and I'm not even implying that. Rather, I just want to have the byzantine notation above the music, properly spaced etc., just like lyrics already are. I am convinced that there are some "easy" solutions to this problem, maybe just the merger of all the separate fonts into one single font file so it is usable as lyrics in Dorico, or maybe the introduction of these glyphs into Bravura... I don't know. I only wish that I find a solution in time for the summer deadline for my piece...
Thank you
