A more useful documentation in other languages than English

Dorico
#1

I use Dorico in Spanish and I have a lot of problems with documentation because the different languages don’t share the same shortcuts. For instance, in Spanish you invoke the tuplet bar with the letter “ñ”, which doesn’t exist in any other language…

Another case, I want to know how to do enharmonic respelling, but I don’t know how you have translated it in Spanish. So my suggestion is that once you’ve found it in English, you can either go to the equivalent page in Spanish (where you can find the proper shortcut) or, every time there is a shortcut, a kind of chart with the shortcuts in the different translations.

I really like Dorico, but I don’t think it’s intuitive because options are hidden in the different workflows and you have to know where the option is located to find it (which makes finding things much more difficult). Sibelius on the other hand is way more intuitive (however, engraving is much better in Dorico and that’s why I prefer your program).

All these kind of issues I’m finding in Dorico are in fact related. Of course, once you’ve memorized how everything is, then it’s fine. But I think you should work in something to make Dorico more intuitive. And a better documentation for other languages than English is a very welcome first step.

Thank you for your awesome work!

#2

Dear reztes,
There is a logic behind the options that helped me a lot (and still does) to find your way is to ask yourself whether the option you need is general (should work in every layout), or only for specific layouts, or only for specific flows. Or, more subtle, if the option you want could change from one flow to another, or from a layout to another.
Engraving options are for the whole document, Layout options for specific layouts and Notation options for specific flows.
Once you’ve understood this logic, it is very consistent, and allows you to find options you did not even know existed.
Hope this helps!

#3

chart with the shortcuts in the different translations.

That would be really great and a good help.
It was asked for it many times before… Because in the moment of translating the manual, someone transfered the shortcuts anyway. So it shouldn’t be that difficult.
But Noone knows…

Also the term “enharmonic” was searched and discussed before.
Maybe it will be integrated into the next version? Hopefully.

#4

I’m sorry to hear you’ve had difficulty using the Spanish documentation. Unfortunately at the moment, the Spanish Dorico manual isn’t being actively translated.

Your point about differing shortcuts for different languages is completely valid of course, and it’s something we’re very actively working on behind the scenes - as boringly technical as it must sound, it’s surprisingly non-trivial to achieve in a way that is both consistently accurate and requires as little long-term maintenance as possible. On a positive note, I think this will be implemented in the very near future. A chart that shows each key command in every possible language is an interesting idea, but hopefully showing language-specific key commands automatically for each language as we’re planning will be a very positive improvement already.

Making it easier to ‘step’ across the manual between different language versions is also something we’ve discussed and is something we would like to make available, along with a clearer indicator (such as a banner at the top of the screen) if you’ve landed on an older version of the manual, particularly if you’ve come via an online search. You can do something similar manually, by replacing the /en/ part of the url with the appropriate language - for Spanish, that’s /es/, German is /de/. But as the Spanish manual isn’t available beyond v1, that’s less simple than for German, French, Italian or Japanese.


If I remember correctly, that was included in this thread? When I checked, “enharmonisch” provided plenty of useful results in the German manual. The direct search in the manuals on steinberg.help requires quite specific entries - if the word you entered doesn’t appear exactly, it probably won’t come up (that’s why when you missed one ‘e’ out of Notenzeilenabstand, you had no results, but there were some with the full word). But when you start typing in the search bar, a drop-down appears with suggestions - this might be helpful? The translators will translate all words in the manual, including keywords in the metadata, so that’s why the English versions of words like “enharmonic” won’t appear - if you think that’s something German users will be searching for a lot, please tell us and we can pass that on to the translators for consideration.

You might also find searching in a dedicated search engine might be better at bringing up closely-related results? I think it’s fair to say that someone like Google’s linguistic analysis is able to be more sophisticated as that’s its entire purpose!

#5

I found it (thanks to Marc advice). You named it “reescribir”. In Spanish I’ve never called “Rescribir” this action. I’ve always used a word you can’t find in the dictionary which is “enarmonizar”. I think you should write it as “Reescribir enarmónicamente”. The important word is “enharmonic”, not “respelling”.

I hope you can improve the documentation for other languages than English soon, because every time I need to use a feature I know it exists but I don’t know how it is done (or I can’t remember it) it’s like solving a puzzle.

It happens to me a lot also with the size of the bars, which is placed in the setup mode instead of the layout mode (I can’t understand why, as it is a very important thing when I’m making the parts for marching band -all the music has to fit into only one sheet-). So, bar size is in the setup part (and it’s not even named like that) but it’s the thing you’re going to tweek the last (if you’re working with marching bands, otherwise I wouldn’t change it).

And well, I really like Dorico and how the score looks at the end. And of course, I like how the great team you are is always there looking how to improve and listening to the community. Thank you both for your help!

#6

I am sorry to say I am not sure I understand this. Are you talking about space size (which of course has great consequences on the length of a bar)? It makes perfect sense to have that in Layout options, because your layouts (the scores you are going to export once your work in Dorico is finished) can have different paper sizes, different sizes depending on which instrument it is made for (full score/individual parts, etc).

#7

If that is indeed what you mean (the size of staves, the size of the page etc that are all set in Layout Options), you can also open Layout Options from any mode, you don’t have to be in Setup mode - the English key command for Layout Options is Ctrl/Cmd-Shift-L. Off the top of my head I can’t remember if that’s the same in Spanish though.

This is also true for the other options dialogs, using the key commands you can access them from any mode (Layout Options, Notation Options, Note Input Options, Engraving Options, and Playback Options).

(And thank you for your comment about “Rescribir” specifically - I’ll make a note of it and feed it back to our translators.)

#8

plenty of useful results in the German manual

Hey yes sorry I was unprecise … I meant that the term does not exist in the program itself.

I dont know exactly, but as also safer wrote in another thread, the description in the app for enharmonic exchange is very uncommon in German as far as I know…

Best regards

#9

What I do is having that window always opened, because I haven’t learnt the shortcut yet, but I’ll try! Thank you for the idea.