Change slur styles

Dorico
1

Hello everyone

I am a new-ish user of Dorico 3.5, having made the jump from Finale earlier in the year, which I had been using since for ever.

I am gradually getting used to the Dorico way of working. But I still have to look up a lot of things to remind myself how to do something.

There are some things that I can’t find in the user manual. I am working on an imported XML file (Handel Gavotte HWV 491, should you be interested), and I was hoping someone might be able to help.

I would like to convert some (but not all) slurs from normal to editorial. I know how to do this using the properties panel, but only with one slur at a time. Is there a way to select more than one slur at a time, and batch change them?

Many thanks

2

Welcome! It’s natural that it takes a little while to get used to a new software, you’ll find plenty of people here who have been through the same process who are very happy to help other new users.

With changing the style of slurs, you should find that as long as you only have slurs selected, the Slurs group in the Properties panel is available no matter how many slurs you have selected. You can make a large selection and filter for slurs, or you can e.g. Ctrl/Cmd-click each slur you want to change. The manual usually uses the plural for such tasks (e.g. “Select the slurs whose style you want to change”) to imply this, and in the circumstances where you really are limited to editing a single item, this should be explicitly stated.

3

There are several options. The first one is the most general way to select a “random” set of slurs.

  • Click to select a slur, then ctrl-click to select another one and repeat. The properties panel lets you edit properties that are common to everything that is selected, so if you make sure you only select slurs you can change all the properties at once.
  • Select a passage, then Edit / Filter / Slurs
  • Select a slur, then Edit / Select More to select the next slur. If you repeat the Select More command it will select all slurs up to the end of the system, and then the end of the flow.
4

Many thanks to Lillie and Rob. It was the really basic thing of not being able to select more than one slur at a time that I was struggling with. I thought I had tried every combination of modifier keys. Obviously not. Many thanks to both of you.