cross staff question

Hello

I’m having a hard time finding the right way to do something that should be fairly simple from the user perspective…

Look at the following :
I need to put an ocatava bassa on the bass clef staff the encompasses the low G and the low E.
I can’t do that because, the G is actually on the upper staff. When it’s on the upper staff, I can put the octava marking, but by moving the note down to the lower staff, I loose it.

Any idea how I should do this ?
Best

Yan
Screenshot 2020-05-21 at 08.14.15.jpg
Untitled Project 3.dorico.zip (552 KB)

  1. Invoke the caret.
  2. Check that the caret has appeared on the correct stave. If not, use up/down arrow.
  3. Shift-C 8ba Enter Space Space Space Space etc.

oh ! thank you…
very intuitive I must confess…

Can anything be done to simplify these kind of things in Dorico in the future ??
I guess it would mean to somehow make the graphical objects more tolerant to graphical edits…

Same thing with the “switch to engrave mode to flip a stem on a tied note” issue I had yesterday.
I understand the logic behind the choices here, but from user perceptive, it is often obscure to guess or find out…

Thanks pianoleo
Best

Yan

I don’t know whether we can make this “intuitive”, i.e. that you would be able to do it by guessing, but I think that’s an unrealistically high bar for software design in a domain as complex as music notation.

But Dorico is very consistent. When you create an item, it goes where the caret is. If you can remember that simple fact, it will make the inputting of more or less every item in the software easier, because the caret location is preferred over the selected item, and thus you can then easily create items on staves where there are no notes (like this example), or in the middle of tied notes (which you cannot otherwise select in Write mode), and so on.

Dorico isn’t “intuitive” if by “intuitive” you mean “works exactly like Sibelius/Finale/whatever other software I’ve used for 20 years”, but it is consistent, and once you have learned some of these key idioms, you can apply them wholesale to everything you do with the software.