I think I may have encountered a set of related bugs in my (trial) version of Dorico Pro 2:
When in Write or Engrave mode, changing a time signature’s color in the Common group of the Properties panel does not appear to have any visible effect (apart from the small colored square next to the “Color” property changing as expected). The same holds true (mutatis mutandis) for key signatures, bar lines, stems (Engrave mode only), and probably more.
Also note that unselecting and reselecting a stem after attempting to change its color results in the aforementioned small colored square vanishing (and being reset to black when toggling the “Color” property off and on again).
When in Engrave mode, attempting to change an accidental’s color results in a change not of the selected accidental but of the notehead it precedes.
(In case this behavior is intentional to some degree, I find it to be rather confusing.)
Unfortunately not all items respect the colour property, which is not a bug as such but rather a number of things that are as yet un-implemented. Accidentals cannot be coloured independently of notes because they are fragments of the note itself. We could in future add a separate property to allow accidentals to be coloured independently, but I’d be interested to know what you would find that useful for. Thanks!
While I don’t think that, personally, I’ll ever be in need of an option to colorize accidentals only (with the associated noteheads remaining black), such a feature might possibly come in handy as a convenient didactic means for music teachers preparing exercise sheets for their students (e.g., an introductory exercise sheet on accidentals might include some bars of music with the flats colored red, the naturals colored blue, and the sharps colored green, [and courtesy accidentals colored yellow, perhaps,] or similar use cases).
At any rate, I’d appreciate it if interface elements acting as placeholders or triggers for features that have not actually been implemented yet could be grayed out or marked in a similar way so that it’s clear to the users that the perceived lack of functionality or seemingly erroneous behavior is in fact intentional / known to the developers.
Yes, of course we aim to do that, but in the specific case of the ‘Common’ group of the Properties panel that’s a bit tricky to achieve, and we would rather spend any time in that area actually implementing support for colouring those items rather than disabling the controls. Nevertheless your point is of course a valid one.
In our editorial context it would be very interesting to have the possibility to color individual accidentals (e.g. it is possible to have selected accidentals in grey in Score). Instead of using brackets for editorial accidentals in piano music (which often produces an unasthetic layout) I would prefer to have these accidentals in grey - and I hoped that there is (or will be) a way to do so in Dorico.
Use case for colouring accidentals: I work with a SEND group where some players use parts with colour-coded notes. At the moment I can colour the noteheads themselves (in conjunction with the pitch-name noteheads), but the accidentals cannot themselves be coloured. Even if they kept the same colour as the notes they relate to that would be extremely helpful.
A very late bit of input here but I just ran across a good use of and reason for being able to link accidental color change to the note color change. I’m preparing a very simple scale page for my granddaughter showing her the WWhWWWh formula for major scale form. I was trying to show a chromatic scale with the non used intermediate half steps grayed out in order to better illustrate the pattern. It’s cool I can easily gray out the notes but the accidentals remain black. A non essential, I grant you, but for educators, it would be a useful enhancement.
Kind regards
Welcome to the forum, thaupt, and thanks for the feedback. It’s interesting that different posters in this same thread want two different behaviours: for accidentals to follow the colour of the notehead, or for accidentals to be able to have their own colour (and of course there’s also the current behaviour that we would have to maintain as well).
The more differentiated the choices, the more user needs are likely to be met: Of course, there are situations where both the note head and the accidentals should have one colour (so the current behaviour should be maintained as one of the possibilities, naturally). In our case, the longing to do without the often (especially in piano-music) unsightly square brackets around editor-added accidentals, which often can only placed neatly with difficulty, is great. Instead the bracket-free coloured accidentals (with a normal black notehead) would do a fine work (depending from the color of the accidentals…). Perhaps Father Christmas could fulfill such a wish?..