Scotty, please submit this to tech support. Use the Submit a Request tab at the to of the page. This is a user forum, and we don’t know how often they look.

Another indication of releasing 27 too soon. Until they get the whole SMuFL thing straightened out, many of us have gone back to F26.

SH: Do you need to use SMuFL? I certainly have used it (mainly because I do like one or two fonts like Petaluma, although with tweaks since the dynamics look like the same font as what was used by the Third Reich, which is not cool) but it does cause some minor issues on my end, like disappearing notes on first staff systems (need to pinch-zoom to reveal the notes), large borders for text blocks, etc. I'd blame Steinberg since it's their invention, but honestly, I suspect it's mostly the implementation in Finale 27.x. So if you go back to a non-SMuFL font for the text entries (no reason you can't change text fonts to whatever you want; I do it all the time), is it better? I don't use enclosures so can't provide any personal experience there. 

Thanks Mike, but I posted here to see if anyone had a solution. Tech support isn't gonna do anything because the issue is where those characters are in the font file.

And David, no I guess I don't need to use those fonts. But I like to stay relevant with technology. I thought if this were a step toward better cross-compatibility with other notation platforms I'd embrace it. I could go through the bother of writing automated scripts to handle it, which I may. But thought I'd check here first.

Hi Scotty,

You are correct that there has been a significant change in respect to how the glyphs used to create enclosures with handwritten fonts are entered when using a SMuFL-based font. This change is expected behavior though given how the different types of fonts handle characters like these. You can get more info on this here.

Accessing these characters is quite different than it used to be so, unfortunately, this will impact your current workflow. You can, of course, still use legacy fonts to create expressions with enclosures in the same manner that you always have, but the procedure has changed with SMuFL-based fonts. As the article linked above explains (and as it appears you have found out already), you can access these glyphs from the Symbol Selection dialog box with the Text menu Insert Symbol option (or OPTION+SHIFT+COMMAND+S).

The other option to enter in the enclosures you want (and any of the other many glyphs in a SMuFL-based font) is to use Unicode Hex input. This requires using the hex keyboard input which is turned on via your macOS System Preferences under the Keyboard > Input Sources preference. Once this is activated, you can use hex code to enter any glyph in the currently selected font. This may not be an ideal option for every case, but may be good to use in certain situations.