This is a crazy feature request, or perhaps an idea.
The thing is: making music books (or online books).
When I first saw Dorico and its engraving mode, my imagination flew high and I though we would be able to write an article in a text-frame and then put a music frame inside this document that point to a part of a flow, making possible to create dynamic examples inside a book (examples that you can change easily).
Then, you can “compile” the document in a webpage or interactive pdf in which you have your book, and you are reading and if you click in the example, it plays. Or you compile it as a document and a disk with the examples, labeled with the name of the figure (which you can edit in the music frame).
And you have all your text and music data inside a unique archive. It may be very niche, but at the same time I think it’s not possible doing something like this right now.
Of course it’s a crazy idea, but I wanted to share it. And maybe you know something similar to this (and not only the good old capture from the program).
My idea is inspired in what you can achieve with markdown and plantuml, mermaid, source code, etc. to make diagrams (or code examples) inside the markdown document, which you can later export to webpages, pdf documents, etc.
This would be a phenomenal upgrade to the software. Another option would be the ability to be able to link a musical passage into Pages or Word (others, too) that would update as the music is updated. I’m not sure if any other notation app can do this but it would be a world-class feature.
It is fully doable (except(?) for on-demand playback[1]), with various solutions depending on the extent of the music samples and the complexity of the publication as a whole.
Since each flow can be exported to individual files, they can be accessed by any professional layout software (not sure about MS Word) with batch updates of linked files. (Personally, I prefer to work with individual projects and not with flows, but to each their own.)
If the music changes ‘too much,’ manual page breaking might be required. Only TeX supports dynamic changes of image and PDF sizes for printed/PDF output, but if the music does not change too much in length, software like InDesign and FrameMaker (I can’t speak for Affinity Publisher as I have never used it) can be used as well. I think(?) InDesign warns when frames are overfilled. @dan_kreider is the ‘master’ at Dorico/InDesign.
Web pages would be no problem using a built-in PDF viewer or batch converting the music to a suitable graphics format, e.g. PNG. No “pages” exist on the web, so any larger change would not cause problems. If the multipage built-in PDF viewer is not used, one might need to use a server-side language like PHP to calculate the number of individual image files to display.
[1] Individual audio and video files can be mounted automatically in some software (and certainly on a web page), but one must export such files from Dorico. A web server would probably not be able to play native Dorico files. Possibly, there exist web plug-ins for Dorico; I don’t know for certain as I have never used the audio/DAW functions in Dorico.