Any way to paste notes without removing existing text?

Consider this, where I want to paste that exciting scale into the blank rest part to liven it up a little

The text is attached to the rest I think, so when I paste those notes into it the text get removed. Any way to prevent this?

This only applies to local text, system text stays there of course, but then I have less control over the text such as where it appears, and it may not be appropriate for all players.

Paste Special>Reduce works!

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I never would have thought of that … is that a feature, or a bug? :grin:

I’m curious though how that makes sense.

My logic was that reduce doesn’t appear to overwrite what is already there, whereas, as you found, normal paste does.

@Richard_Lanyon and I discussed this here

So I think that reduce internally is a “merge mode” operation, whereas a regular paste is an “overwrite mode” operation. Presumably Explode is also a merge mode.

I think it’s a side effect, it seems that Reduce could be either merge or overwrite (don’t know could be wrong, and ultimately it doesn’t matter too much), but it’s a very convenient work around for my issue here, so I’ll take it!

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Regular paste will depend on the setting of chord mode, so if you turn on chord mode before you do the paste then I think it will leave the text alone.

As already mentioned, some of the special paste modes will always do a merge, irrespective of the state of chord mode.

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Chord mode was the first thing I was going to suggest, but I was too slow to try it and make sure.

Great explanation of both - I use chord mode of course, but I’m usually fixated on pitches at the time and not thinking about other nuances. Lillie? it almost seems to me that it would make an interesting sort of Dorico philosophy blog post or something. When we are inclined to sit back to listen with a hot beverage and just absorb the information for a bit.

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Second that, Dorico is a deep program now, I’m digging into these design decisions because by understanding them it helps be better remember the various ways to do something.

Turns out chord mode is the best approach. I had an occasion to use explode to copy two staves to two other staves, but it’s overwrite. Going into chord mode and doing a regular paste did a merge. So for merging it seems chord mode regular paste is the better way to do it.