Adjusting slurs, counterpart layout engrave mode improvement

Dorico
#1

Even if Dorico does a good job with the slurs there are still many cases where I have to adjust manually. And I know I have to do it twice for each instance, in the score and in the part, as there is no way of copying the adjusted slur to the part. Not automatically and not manually, right?

This is what I do:
-adjust slur to my liking in the score
-with slur still selected, I press W for counterpart layout
-switches to the part indeed, but the slur in question is not selected any longer.

It would be great if what is selected in the score in engrave mode stays selected when I switch to the part, just like it does in write mode. This behaviour seems logical to me - I cannot think of one single occasion when I would not want or expect this to happen.

Thanks
LAE

#2

This works reliably if you’re in Write mode before you hit W, right?

#3

Daniel, it’s reliable for me in Write mode but doesn’t work in Engrave mode.

#4

Yeah, that’s kind of my point. It’s designed to work in Write mode but it’s more undefined in Engrave mode because of the way selections are transformed between those two modes. So I would suggest doing Ctrl+2 W Ctrl+3 instead of just W and it should then work as needed, at least for now.

#5

Ok, thanks. I’ll get that into my workflow.

Is there a more efficient way to deal with doing the double edits, or am I on the right track here?

#6

You are on the right track, for the time being. As you know we do plan to try to streamline this kind of thing in the future. It’s also worth making sure that you really have got the default slur engraving options to the optimal values for your tastes to try to minimise the amount of manual editing you find necessary.

#7

OK, good to know, and I know that you are working on the connection between layouts.
Actually I think the slurs are really very good most of the time. The few cases that I need to edit are

1 - when slur does not follow the direction of the music, like in G-clef b to a slurred. This one you are working on I believe? It has at least been discussed earlier.
2 - when slur collides with staff lines. It would be good to have something like “Ties crossing staff lines”/“Preferred approach…” but for slurs.
3 - when slur is bisecting a flat sign it sometimes turns out better, sometimes worse. Maybe this is one of those things that will always need human eyes and preferences, but it would be great to have more choices of preferred approach to how to avoid the flat. Usually when I do it manually it is enough just to move the whole slur upwards instead of changing the curvature or the angle.

Of course we are already spoilt with not having to do much editing at all in Dorico, but always looking forward to more magic :slight_smile:

#8

I just found out that if I adjust a slur in both score and part, that slur will when copied and pasted to another place get its adjusted look in both the score and part. This can save some tweaking time…