For whatever reason, I’ve never had to do this before - ‘framing’ notes and (background etc) highlighting (not necessarily vertically or horizontally) sections of a score etc.
I know there are Frames in Engrave Mode; but can Dorico achieve such effects as these in Write Mode, please (perhaps a little more neatly (!) in the first case:
Thanks in advance for any ideas…!
This can be best done in a .pdf version of your score. If you are on macOS you may use the Preview application to do the annotations.
To do these annotations in Dorico, you could use lines with curved line bodies to frame notes and mostly transparent thick solid lines to highlight them:
Thank you, @k_b; Yes, on macOS and familiar with Preview etc.
Ideally I do want it within Dorico, though 
Thanks, John!
So the Lines Panel in the Notation Toolbox… I hoped it might be that easy. Will do !
Here is the Dorico project which generated the image in post #3:
Annotations.dorico (1.3 MB)
Before adding annotations to a project, it is important to finish the layout of the music. Otherwise, changes in note or staff spacing can disturb the positions of the annotations.
To make both halves of an oval, I created two curved line bodies named Oval (left) and Oval (right) followed by two vertical lines with the same names. Then I created an instance of each of these lines, disabled collision avoidance in engrave mode, changed their color and moved the handles at each end into position.
To make another oval with a different width/height ratio, I would need to duplicate the oval line bodies and change the Y-value of each control point. Then I would need to create new vertical lines using the modified line bodies. This is much more complicated than using a separate program with tools for creating specific shapes.
To make a highlight, I created a generic line body named Highlight followed by a horizontal line with the same name. Then I selected the first and last notes to highlight, created an instance of this line attached to the noteheads, changed its color and transparency, and moved the handles at each end into position.
Many thanks again, John!
To know exactly how to do this is very helpful indeed; and will save me much time.
A colleague and I are discussing analyses of our scores. In Dorico Pro 6.2 I want to be able to highlight, for instance, similarities between various point in scores as presenters of music analysis do in their (YouTube) videos.
I haven’t done that before and imagined there might be a simple ‘pencil’ tool to circle such (sections of) bars in Write mode.
But I can imagine getting used to the method you so kindly describe.
Thanks also for the advice to finalize the score before ‘annotating’ it this way!
FWIW there is such a pencil tool in the iPad version, if you open the reader mode (touch with four fingers)
