Copying and pasting Instrument Names/Staff Labels loses line breaks and formatting

Dorico
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve encountered a strange behavior regarding the text formatting of instrument names (staff labels).

When an instrument name contains a line break, and I copy and paste this text into another instrument’s name field, the line break is not preserved correctly.

If I select and highlight the pasted text, I can see that the line break has been replaced by a character that looks like a regular space. I suspect that due to the internal processing of formatting information, the line break code is being read into the clipboard as a different character.

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Furthermore, other formatting details such as font type and text size are also not pasted correctly. For instance, if I want to use a specific font only for accidentals like the flat symbol (♭), this font customization is lost after pasting, forcing me to manually reapply the font every single time.

While I understand that adding line breaks to staff labels might not be the most encouraged practice in Dorico, I believe that being able to copy and paste them while preserving the original formatting would be extremely beneficial for a wide range of user workflows.

I would love to hear your thoughts on this, or if there is any workaround.

Thanks in advance!

2

Hi Kosuke,
yes, the Instrument Name Text editor window is confusing, indeed.
As far as I know, you cannot do any formatting there, except adding line breaks.
Having said this, you can’t paste line breaks via the clipboard, you will have to redo them after pasting.

If you want to format instrument names, you will have to go and change their Paragraph Style.

3

In general, when you copy and paste rich text in Dorico, whether it’s in a text editor in the score itself, or in a dialog where the text editor is embedded, you’ll lose the rich text formatting. This is something we would like to change in future, but I can’t offer any suggestion about when.