I’ve tried to place a border around the texts Verse and Chorus that I use to identify parts of a tune I’ve constructed in Dorico. It doesn’t seem to matter whether using Write or Engrave modes. Dorico Help has not been helpful to me in this case. Can someone tell me how to do this? I can do underlines and overlines on the text by clicking on it – but no four-sided boxes containing the text, a common matter in printed scores. Am I missing something? --Norm
Hey!
I’ve had exceptional results with Daniel’s suggestion here:
Have you peeked in the properties panel? This is easy for one-off types of things if you don’t need to go through the trouble of creating a dedicated style.
You can adjust each of the four sides individually as well as adjust the border thickness. Alternatively, you can just turn on the border button and use Dorico’s defaults if they suit you.
In Write mode, enter your text as system text (It will have no border). Then open the bottom properties panel and switch on the text border.
That worked. Thanks.
–N
The reason I asked Daniel for a solution is that with Petaluma the default borders look bad and need to be adjusted. I got tired of adjusting them one by one… 
Another option that I use often is to use Rehearsal Marks to indicate Verse, Chorus, Bridge, Intro, Outro, etc.
- Create Rehearsal Marks where you want your sections to be while working in Write mode by selecting a Barline and choosing Shift+A
- Select the first Rehearsal Mark you would like to change and in the Properties panel and click the switch for Index, then change the Index property under the Rehearsal Marks property to the first letter of the word you would like to see in that box (9 for Intro; 3 for Chorus; 22 for Verse; etc)
- Click the switch next to the Suffix property and then enter the word you would like to see appear in the box, omitting the first letter
- Repeat for any other Rehearsal Marks you would like to have appear as words
I like this option because I know the mark will appear at an expected place in the score, and I can mix words or sections with letter designations and the objects will all behave alike.
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Yup, that’s what I did as well, but I got tired of the needed adjustments every time.
I actually formatted my special paragraph style to look exactly like rehearsal marks, since I like the the look of those.
The secret sauce is the custom key command, with which you can invoke the desired paragraph style directly, then you just type whatever you want!
B.
Sorry to hear you weren’t able to find the solution in the manual @normberk - for your own info, here’s the relevant page in the 3.5 manual for using the Border property. If you remember any specific wordings you used when searching, or where you looked in the manual, that would be helpful to know in case there’s something I can improve for others.
For information about the default border setting for paragraph styles, the relevant reference material is here.