a few things

Dorico
#1

Last week I finished my first (simple) score in Dorico and discovered for the first time really what Dorico was about. It’s really convinced me, after a year of stubborn hesitation from my side. There are a few things I don’t fully understand. Perhaps they’re mentioned before.

1 Deleting an empty page. There was a moment I had inserted an empty page in the middle of a score. Later I wanted to get rid of this empty page again. It took me a while to find out this was done by ‘remove page-override’. At least, did worked, perhaps there’s another way. Suppose you have inserted a 4 empty pages at the beginning of the score for titles, performance-notes, etc and later you want to get rid of the second page that is still empty. Now with ‘remove-page-override’ the page isn’t deleted but replaced by the first page of music (and that is not what you want). You can solve it by first moving this empty page right before the first page of music, but is feels a bit clumsy. What do I miss?

2 A tempo ma più mosso. I couldn’t find out how to enter this correctly, using the tempo options in the right panel, combined with adding text in the properties panel. The problem (this must be one of the very tiniest problems) I don’t know (on a Mac) how to enter the accented ù in the text field. Normally on a Mac you press the u a bit longer, choosing one of the option, but in the text-field this results in uuuuuuuu. (perhaps there’s some obvious mac-related solution unknown to me).

3 The last also tiny thing. It’s not a problem, I only don’t understand why. Suppose I have something like picture 1 and I want to change the first beat to a half note. It seems obvious that - by doing this - I want to over-write the second quarter. There’s only one voice involved. Dorico is doing something like picture 2. I discovered that this only happening with an active chords-button, but I don’t get the reason behind it.
2.jpg
1.jpg

#2

I’m pleased to hear that Dorico is beginning to make more sense to you, Douwe. To try to answer your questions:

  1. We did of course toy with having a “delete page” command, but in fact all it would really do is clear the override from a page, so we decided to keep things as they really are, rather than encouraging users to think about pages in a way that doesn’t reflect how they are actually used in the program. It can be a bit of a head-scratcher to begin with, and until we added the little “move page” dialog it could be painful to move an override to the right spot to delete it, but what I would suggest you do for this kind of situation in future is use the Move Pages dialog to move the override to the very end of the layout, then clear its override from there.

  2. Instead of holding down u to see the accented characters popover (which it would be nice if we could support, but it’s not currently possible), type Alt+` and then type “u”. This is the standard way of typing accented characters on Mac that has been around for years and years, before the iOS-style popover was implemented. Some help on how to do this can be found e.g. here.

  3. When the chord tool is active for note input, you’re effectively merging each note you input with the existing notes in the current voice. Because tools like chord input and insert are active both when inputting notes and when editing them (i.e. when the caret’s not visible), then edits will act accordingly. There are certainly times when you may want to e.g. lengthen a note in a voice when there are other voices later in the bar and you don’t want those notes to be overwritten, and that’s what using the chord tool allows: if you don’t want it to happen, then then remedy is simple – switch off the chord tool.

#3

Thanks Daniel

Regarding 2. oops, I feel stupid !
Regarding 3. Until know I’m not that fond on an extra chord-button or the add-interval dialog, but I’m looking forward to the add-interval popover !!

Next thing I came across : When you cmd-select a bunch of notes to input ped-retakes on that notes, one would expect that they all get the retake. However only the first one gets the retake symbol. It means that every retake has to be done one by one (perhaps not, if I’m stupid again…). I would vote for getting retakes on all selected notes at once…!

One other thing regarding ped-lines. Suppose I copy-paiste a ped.line with retakes to the next bars (see image) to avoid doing all (!) those retakes again, it would be practical being able to ‘glue’ the two ped-lines together (with a retake where now the second Ped-sign is). Or is this possible already?
Schermafbeelding 2017-09-14 om 15.20.25.jpg

#4

I wonder if pedal retakes are technically playing techniques. If so, this recent thread may be relevant:
https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=246&t=123394

This has been discussed here: https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=246&t=122770

#5

For your point 3, Douwe, to lengthen or shorten notes you can use Option-Shift-forward or backwards arrow, on a Mac. This will lengthen or shorten notes according to the rhythmic grid at the bottom left of your screen. It’s a fantastic tool and I use it all the time.

#6

Thanks Florian,
In the first thread Daniel advices to select and copy the single playing technique. AFAIK you can’t select a single ped.retake…
Regarding the answer in the second thread, toggling things on and off in the preferences, doesn’t seem a preferable solution. With ‘Allow multiple items to be created with the mouse’ option and set ‘Load cursor with item’ you can’t do long ped.lines and with the option on default you can’t do quick retakes…

#7

Stephen, I forgot about that, thank you, that is a great tool.