Can anyone please tell me if there is a better way to do boxes in Dorico??? This method is so painful. I don’t understand how, in 2025, boxes are not a core feature!
I’ve been doing the popular box workaround featured in other posts, where I create two lines one that functions as the top of the box and the other that functions as the bottom. However, every single time I try to put something above or below the box - whether its text or dynamics, or even playing techniques, the lines get completely messed up and I have to go into engrave mode to fix them. At this point I’m considering writing the piece by hand! Boxes are so essential in this piece - it will include dozens of them. I’m genuinely considering notating the score by hand because this is taking me so long. This is preventing me from writing the piece, from getting notes on the page because I spend more time fussing about with these janky boxes than actually writing music.
Does anyone have any advice on how I can make this process more efficient? Thank you.
(Also, Devs, I’m begging you to please make boxes a core feature of Dorico. A 21st century notation software that doesn’t have aleatoric writing methods baked in is absurd. Are you really going to let Sibelius do boxes better than you!??)
we are at v5, Dorico is very young software only been out a few years. You can see many of the user requests in various threads and posts here. Two below are the current active ones, sharing what users are asking for just at the moment, and if you search, there are many others.
… and then a realization such as this (from one of the v6 wishlist threads)
If we waited for “everything” to be in Dorico before release at v1.0 then we presumably would be waiting another 10 or 20 years before they have it “reasonably” adequate to purchase so it spans the many hundreds of years of the diversity of music notation.
Finale had a lot in there, developed over more than 30 years, and still there were many calls for features to be added, some of which were probably Dorico features and refinements, many of the plugins could have simply (!) been implemented inside it for better integration and sophistication.
But a software team cannot develop for that many years without financing.
Aleatoric boxes are obviously an essential feature for your work, so choosing software in which it has already been implemented would be a better choice, as it would be very quick and easy to create them when required.
Otherwise try exporting from Dorico as PDF then adding them in a design program, although you might have already been doing this.
Edit: Another point here, if you did a “complex” series of workarounds to get what you want in current Dorico (v5), because you want everything possible in that Dorico file, when Dorico adds in Aleatoric boxes, to do any edits to them, you might have to dismantle all those edits to then add them in the way Dorico does them, whereas a if you had exported as PDF, you would still have the Dorico file without the boxes and simply add them in as desired.
