Between your thread here, and @Dup’s questions on this thread, there was obviously a lot of chord symbol confusion on the forum today. One of the best features of Dorico is the responsiveness of the developers, so if you don’t mind me using your thread, I just wanted to summarize some of the issues encountered as they do read all the threads.
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The lack of an obvious global chord symbol suffix editor is very confusing for new users. No one wants to either edit each chord individually, or create chord overrides for every single root as this is a huge waste of time. (Just counting basic “white keys” plus sharps and flats, that’s 21 overrides required for each suffix in a template or default file, not counting double sharps or flats.)
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The factory defaults for the minor minus, the dim circle, 6/9, and major triangle are poor, so many users will understandably want to immediately change these.
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The fact that there is a global suffix editor for some suffixes (but not others), and the only way to access it is to first create an individual override, is very confusing.
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The documentation implies that any chord symbol suffix can have a project-wide change in appearance, but this is just not true. Only the suffixes that appear under the grid and can be selected can have a project-wide change. A major triangle or diminished circle can be changed project-wide, but as something like #9 or b5 doesn’t appear there, no project-wide change is possible for those suffixes so they must be edited for all possible roots.
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Once the user manages to find their way to the Edit Chord Symbol Component dialog, there are several sub-issues:
a) There is no documentation on how Dorico assembles a suffix like #9. There is no way for the user to know they need to use the Composite comp.csymAccidentalSharp as that term doesn’t appear anywhere in the documentation.
b) There is no documentation on how Dorico chooses different glyphs based on whether the scale factor is <=75% or >75%. Without knowledge of a) and b) a user couldn’t reliably rebuild a suffix like #9 in order to modify the positioning of those glyphs should they choose to do so, and would likely create a stylistic inconsistency in the score.
c) The Text tab defaults to using the “Bar Repeat Count” Font Style. It’s entirely likely no one will ever want to use that style in this editing window, and it will cause confusion later when the user tries to modify the “Chord Symbols Font” and realizes that changes some suffixes, but not others using the wrong style. This should really default to the style the user is going to want the overwhelming majority of the time.
d) Obviously if it were easy to fix the WYSIWYG bugs in the editor then they would have been fixed already, but simply changing the attachment point to Baseline Right and Baseline Left fixes many of the issues. Dorico still defaults to Bottom Right and Bottom Left which causes all sorts of discrepancies between this editing window and the Project Default Appearances window (and the score of course.) At the very least, Baseline should be the default to minimize WYSIWYG bugs. -
The sum effect of all of the above combined is to make chord editing “intolerable” and a huge hurdle that must be cleared before using Dorico for any sort of time-sensitive work.
Is that an accurate summation? Feel free to correct me if I’m misrepresenting anything, or add anything I’ve omitted.