'Casting off', why this strange term?

I too was never thrown off by the term “layers” in Finale and prefer it, because it doesn’t mix up “voice”, a musical term with a precise meaning, with a matter of computer input, which deserves its own terminology.

When I searched Dorico help for Page Layout I find page formatting and the casting off definition is right there.

Galley (in a printing sense) is derived from the French galée, I understand.

Exact.
It is among the material of typographer alongside the Composteur, the Visorium, and the Typomètre.

From now on, you’ll be adjusting systems in the visorium. :smile:

I wish I was native English speaking so that I could write a whole book about this, but here are some thoughts.

Does one really need to know all that in order to be able to switch to galley view? In that case I’m not properly educated in the history of book publishing and printing. Should one need to be?

In other applications, this is called things like scroll view, continuous view, or even Panorama; we call it galley view .

Okay, so, again, I’m not native English speaking, but still, why not just use one of the already established terms in software development?

The analogy is imperfect, since in our application galley view produces no pages at all

So why use this analogy then?

but it is the same in spirit

Say what?


With all that said I must say I’m starting to like Dorico more and more. For example the note input and pop-overs are quite nice once you get used to it.

I just need to ignore the different meanings of the word galley in Swedish. That is different kinds of words related to boats.

I imagine many of you are too young to remember what scroll view was called in Finale 1.0:

Igor’s view, after Igor Stravinsky, who often taped score pages to the wall so he could better see the linear progression of the music.

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My remark was in response to @benwiggy saying that “page layout” was already a special Dorico term and therefore couldn’t be used as a replacement for “casting off”. However, I haven’t been able to find “page layout” within the application itself.

The fact that the help app considers “page layout” as synonymous with “page formatting” doesn’t really count, since I am sure that other non-Dorico terms are included in the search field. And it actually may indicate that “page layout” is not Dorico terminology or it would have come up in the search. The first thing I did was search for it, as you did, in the Help app.

Dorico has to be an amazingly capable program to have so many quibble over something as trivial as the term casting off.

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I think it all points out that Engraving (Music) just isn’t the same thing as Composing/Creating music. Although related, they are completely separate disciplines with their own developed concepts/ideas and terminology. We are fortunate enough to have an application here that straddles both. I would venture a guess that this explains the decision to implement Dorico in terms of operational ‘modes’.

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I would also suggest that the devs have learned from some of the issues that occurred when they worked on Sibelius. One of the main reasons I never liked Sib is that the main method of navigating (click and mouse drag) is also the same way that you move notes. This meant that it was never really possible to proofread enough in Sib. It was always too easy to introduce an error at any stage in your workflow simply by navigating around in a score.

One of the great benefits of Dorico’s workflow is that Write and Engrave are separate modes. When I’m working on Engrave mode edits, it’s literally impossible for me to change pitches.

(I’m not a Sib expert, maybe there are further safeguards, that was just my experience.)

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And I am not an attorney, but certain UI (user interface) elements in previously existing applications may be protected, alongside everything else that’s copyrightable/patentable (code itself). So there’s a reason why a similar looking bit of interface has different names: if Dorico named its unbroken, “single system” (no page breaks) edit view e.g. “Panorama”, that would be a lawsuit or C&D waiting to happen.

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13 years on Sibelius here. Despite the fact that I liked it a lot, I can confirm that what you are saying is true. In Dorico of course, you have to check divisi changes. But as long as you know that, you will check!

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Yes, indeed.
A lot of water has passed under the bridge, no doubt, since the last time you used Sibelius.
Sibelius has now implemented several tools for navigating the score without the risk of making input errors. One of the most convenient, and one that I often use, is the Focus on staves function* (that Dorico has not), which lets you isolate a particular instrument or group of instruments (and change the list of isolated instruments on the fly) to concentrate on a narrow section of the score. The other, of course, is to ask for all the bars number to be displayed in input mode, which makes it easy to see where you are in the large orchestral scores, and to check that you have entered the correct measure (there’s also a reminder of the name of the instrument, in blue, when you navigate at high magnification). So there’s no risk of making any inputting error whatsoever.

I would like Dorico had such a tool; for the moment, I’ve seen no other solution than ticking/unticking the instruments in configuration mode (left column). However, this is tedious because there’s no editable list of instruments for switching from one set to another (unless I’ve missed something…).

  • Since 2020.9 version I believe.

Instrument Filters in Dorico do largely the same thing as Focus On Staves, and you can set presets and recall them (in a way that you can’t with Focus On staves).

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Sorry, but in Sibelius, we can make lists in order to call / recall them easily.
Once more, A lot of water has passed under the bridge in 2024.10 version, and It would be nice if the assertions about other softwares often given in this forum were more correctly filled in. I say this without being in any way aggressive, of course.

Also, if I’m not mistaken, the instruments filter in Dorico only works in scroll view (Galley), whereas the Focus on Staves in Sibelius works in all modes (I rarely use Panorama).

@FredGUnn Did you find the same to be true in Finale?

I never did; my errors are of a different type. For that reason, I find the separation into Write and Engrave modes to be a huge impediment.

No, because the method of navigating and the method of editing were separate things in Finale. In Finale on Windows you could invoke the Hand Grabber tool to navigate around simply by holding down the right mouse button while dragging. (Just tested and apparently this is Opt+Cmd dragging on a Mac instead of right mouse button.) In any case, the way you dragged to navigate was a separate function from the way you edit notes. In Sib these are the same.

With Sib, I could have already gotten revisions back from a proofreader, made my final edits, go to make a final pass through, and introduce a new error simply with a careless click while navigating. Sure, don’t be careless, but large copying jobs are always on a deadline and I’m always operating on some serious sleep debt. Using the same method to both navigate and edit in Sib is a major design flaw IMO.

I’ve been a serious Lightroom user since V1.0 and it has a modular design similar to Dorico:

I guess this type of modular design was already very familiar to me by the time I made the switch back in D2, so that was never really an impediment. There are some things I wish I could do in Write, and I did hack in a System Break command so I can create those in Write, but overall I’m a fan of Dorico’s modular design.

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“Galley view” was first used as a term in Composer’s Mosaic from MOTU, itself the successor to Professional Composer, and first released in 1992, so it is only a few years younger than Finale. So it is not a term that was invented by us: we decided to use this term at least partly because it had already been used in Mosaic.

In English the word “galley” is I think also more readily associated with the maritime world, with probably its most widely-understood meaning being that of being a ship’s kitchen. This seems also to be its earlier meaning, dating back to perhaps the 14th century. Its use in publishing came a couple of hundred years later, possibly because the trays used to hold the hot metal type were long and thin, like the old oar-driven ships that were originally called “galée” in French and “galea” in Italian.

But many words in English (and, I imagine, almost every language) have several disparate meanings, so it would be absurd to avoid using a word simply because it has multiple meanings.

And in any case I will defend our right both to assign novel names to features or user interface elements in Dorico, and to use terms of art drawn from and specific to the traditions of the craft of music engraving and publishing. We see Dorico as being a continuation of those traditions in the digital world.

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Clearly, entering Dorico’s Play Mode means it’s time to pick up one’s cricket or baseball bat, yes? (What else could it possibly mean???)

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I think the problem is not the polysemy of a word, but rather the use of a very specialised term that no web search or translator knows about.
This is what the users above have raised; I note that @Tomas_E (Swedish) obtained the same results as I did when he stumbled across a boat reserved for slaves, that questions more than one neophyte who is ignorant of the old terms used by music printers.

Having said that, I don’t deny you the right to choose such terms, to link Dorico to a great tradition of music engraving, even if, from my point of view, the display principle proposed by the Galley View has nothing to do with the word Galée.
Having said that, I don’t deny you the right to choose such terms, to link Dorico to a great tradition of music engraving, even if, from my point of view, the display principle proposed by the Galley View has nothing to do with the word Galée.
Similarly, as I wrote above, the translation of Casting-off into French version of Dorico is excellent and fits the purpose (calibrage) perfectly. Wasn’t there a word in English that was closer to the one used in French and less mysterious for users?

allow me to correct a little: galley in French translates as galère, not galée.
The convicts who were the oarsmen were called Galériens.

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