Choral Particularities

Hi all,
Just as I started a thread for “Organ / Keyboard Particularities” I think it would be a good idea to have a similar catch all place to discuss things particularly related to choral writing in Dorico.

With that, my first question is: is there a way to get tempo markings to appear above all voice parts? I’ve been working on a few SATB scores and convention dictates that “rit.” “allarg.” etc. should appear above each vocal line. The problem is, Dorico only puts it above the upper-most part. Is there a setting I just haven’t found yet? Or do we just need to use “system text” (alt+shift+x) to achieve this until it’s formally implemented?

At this point your best option is to treat it like dynamics: enter one in, then copy-paste or alt-click to the other staves. Alt-click is darn fast, I must say.


This is a known feature request, but I’m waiting for manual vertical lyric baseline adjustment. It’s in the queue.

I tried alt clicking once and didn’t get it to work (and yes, I love alt clicking too! It’s arguably one of my favorite and most used features). I’ll be more deliberate in experimenting with this the next time I encounter it.

I’m looking forward to more control over lyric placement too. I’m also hoping for an option to justify verse numbers for hymnal work.

Another feature request:

I’d love an automatic option that senses when you put a non-breaking space in a lyric and thereby automatically left-aligns that lyric. This would make reciting tones a breeze, for instance. It is often not desirable to make everything left aligned, however long phrases with non-breaking spaces certainly benefit from left alignment. Screen Shot 2020-12-30 at 2.11.04 PM

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[FR] for D4+: option to prefer ligatures in lyrics.

As a general rule I prefer ligatures all around, but I set quite a bit of Latin text and I particularly use æ and œ a lot. I have the mac key commands memorized for them now, but I’m currently updating an XML import today, and it requires me to delete and re-enter and there are quite a few instances of it in this particular score. It would have saved me lots of time if an option preferring these ligatures already existed.

(I concede this may be less than practical as there would likely need to be multiple options; english, for instance, would use lots of ligatures like Th and fl but not the æ. But, as momma always says, “it never hurts to ask!”)

In the meantime, could you perhaps select a lyric, go Edit Line of Lyrics, cut and paste the contents into a word processor, run a find and replace for ae and oe and then cut and paste back into Dorico?

Hadn’t thought of find and replace. I might try that next time.