In most programs where user-entered numbers are allowed, such as in Dorico’s “add bars” dialog (shift-B in Write mode), when the user enters a number without a + or - sign it is interpreted as a positive number (as it is in mathematics) but for some reason in Dorico entering a number alone in the “add bars” dialog results in no action at all. To add bars we need to enter the + sign plus the number. Can this be changed so that we can simply enter a number without the plus sign and that number of empty bars will be added?
A second request – using the - sign to remove bars is a potentially dangerous tool and I think it would be nice to add a warning before executing the command. I realize that there is always the “undo” feature but a warning would be nice. Case in point – I was just experimenting (which is all I am doing right now with Dorico, in order to get comfortable with all that it can do) and I used the shift-B command to add some new measures (35 in this particular case). The new bars were inserted between bars of existing music (like I would expect them to). Then I did shift-B over the 2nd barline of these new measures and hit shift-B again and typed “-35” and Dorico removed 35 bars of the score beginning with the barline I had clicked shift-B over. So I was left with 2 empty bars and the 2 bars which had music in them following the newly added empty bars were deleted as well (as they should be since they were included in the measure count I had entered). Would it be possible for Dorico to have a popup warning to the effect of “This command will remove some measures which have music in them. Do you want to continue? Yes / No”
I realize that I should actually know what I’m doing when I add or remove measures in a scoring program, but when removing a large number of measures, some of them will not be showing onscreen and I might have miscounted what I intended to do and a warning would be helpful in my opinion.
Thanks for reading all our rambling questions and suggestions – I realize that not all of them are practical or as important as others and thus are triaged for possible work later on or discarded out of hand as being unnecessary or impossible while the more pressing needs are addressed first.