In Setup mode, I’ve meticulously renamed players/staffs to be standard capitalization (“Soprano 1”) but in my score, my voices show up capitalized (“SOPRANO 1”) while my piano appears in standard capitalization (“Piano”). Where is the setting for this stored? I’ve checked everywhere I can think of.
You need to edit the actual staff label, not just the player name. Click on the arrow beside the instrument to view the “Edit name” dialog.
I did. (I assume this is what you mean?)
(Note that I’ve entered it as “Soprano 1” but it shows up on my score as “SOPRANO 1”.)
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There’s a setting in Engraving Options > Staff Labels for whether vocal staves should be in ALL CAPS or not.
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I believe some of the vocal project templates have this option set to uppercase by default.
Without meaning to gripe particularly - it does annoy me that vocal templates use capital letters by default. I don’t know of a single modern edition that capitalises these staff names, and I don’t like how it looks…
fingers crossed user templates in D4
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The only major publishers that do this are Oxford University Press and Schott. It does seem odd that such a specific house style thing would get a dedicated option when the majority of the world doesn’t do it.
Many aspects of Sibelius house style defaults were modeled on OUP (especially the Plantin font), and some of those, not too surprisingly, have carried over to Dorico defaults.
My question/minor objection is really that it is slightly arbitrary for voice parts to be auto-capitalized, and piano to not be capitalized (in a choral score), and then for the preference to be so hidden and tucked away in a place you would not think to look for it.
The simpler implementation would have simply been to let the user manually rename the staff in caps if they so wished (“SOPRANO 1”) and if the user chooses to not capitalize (“Soprano 1”) then Dorico just displays it that way. Plain and simple.
I sometimes resist when software believes you should adhere to their preferences that they make it cumbersome to override – this isn’t a workflow issue – it’s a personal preference.
A more direct method, perhaps, but using the prefs, as benwiggy mentioned in post #5, is certainly easier and faster.
I think Engraving Options is quite a logical place for it.
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Lol. You think it odd that British developers include an option for imitating the Oxford style? At least where the choral world is concerned, Oxford has been a major player for a long time. I can’t say that I’m surprised (or perturbed) in the slightest.
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“I sometimes resist when software believes you should adhere to their preferences that they make it cumbersome to override – this isn’t a workflow issue – it’s a personal preference.”
USER 450
(Sorry, I messed up the quoting somehow)
I don’t think it is that - The design goal of Dorico as I understand is not to hide or mandate, but to have you set up your preferences just once (ish) and then have Dorico behave like you want it to automatically without requiring any more than the minimal manual effort. So while you can do things, it prefers to guide you to make changes to the automation parameters.
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And somebody else will come along and say, “every octavo I have ever sung from has the voice parts capitalized even though the rest of the score is written normally. Why doesn’t dorico do this by default?”
Dorico doesn’t hide or prevent you from changing (and saving as default) things to be just to your liking.
OUP has a lot to answer for believe you me!
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Dorico doesn’t hide or prevent you from changing (and saving as default) things to be just to your liking.
You’re correct, but it does choose a curiously arbitrary capitalization system that only applies to some instruments. And it took me a bunch of Google searching and then starting this thread before I found the (arguably) slightly hidden pref to override it, which, in my opinion, is a sign of less-than-ideal UX. Why not design things in a more consistent way by default, then if they want to bury the OUP-friendly option in a menu, by all means, have at it.
I think the developer team does everything in their power to do exactly that. Sometimes (generally I think) it is absolutely stellar. Sometimes I think they need users to give feedback (which we do) and they use that to make an even better product. Sometimes we are highly opinionated, get stuck circling the drain, and are a pain in the anatomy.
Never ever though, are they dumb or need our admonition to “why not design consistently”. You will see the pitchforks come out then. For me at least, I’ll button up my overalls and grab my straw hat in their defense because we’re half afraid we will wear our welcome; that Ulf or Daniel is going to go find a nice beach somewhere and write romance novels instead.
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In response to your thread, I’ve already reviewed the metadata of that page in the manual, so hopefully a wider range of future searches will bring it up more quickly.
In general though, if you’ve got Dorico Pro, Engraving Options is always a good place to look if you want to change how something appears or its default position. It’s also genuinely just a nice thing to do, because the team puts so much effort into adding all those pictures and diagrams to clarify exactly what the options do.
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The amount of it they put up with on here, I’d happily help fund that trip!
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