Vaughan is right; meant to mention that too. It does not “take over the foreground” like when you switch between programs. It works just like a virtual keyboard, it simply is in a different format visually.
I entered Leo’s example easily without using character viewer or pasting anything. The trick is to select the right keyboard input source on Mac. I set my keyboard to English / ABC - Extended. That gives me the háček as alt-v and many others. This is set in keyboard preferences, under the “input sources” tab. With that setting (and I leave it that way all the time), I can touch-type Czech text without using the Czech keyboard layout (I’m used to the US layout), certainly including Antonín Dvořák as I just touch-typed it that way here.
Using the built-in Keyboard Viewer I learned the modifiers I need. Hold down alt and it will show which letters give which marking. So, to get Č, I type alt+v, release the keys, and type C. Alt+k gives ring. Alt-e followed by a letter gives an accent, such as é, alt-k gives the ring (ů).
This works in Dorico both for lyrics and the project info dialog box. (Where I say “alt” here, that key is also labeled “option” on my Apple keyboard.)
test1.dorico.zip (548 KB)
George, my point wasn’t that it’s not possible, but that it’s not possible using the methods previously described in this thread…
Leo, indeed you are correct, but your example gave me an excuse to try the lyrics popover, which I’d not used before. It amazes me that Dorico makes things so easy that I can try something like that just for fun while replying to a thread. Anyway, I enter a lot of Czech song lyrics (outside Dorico) without needing the methods they described, so I thought I’d tell about the extended keyboard layout that makes it easy for me.
GeorgeJ–
Thank you! That is VERY helpful. (And not just for my immediate problem.)
–L3B
P.S. to Romanos. Yes, I’m very aware of those ‘shortcuts.’ I use the ‘g’ one all the time.
Aha! I knew it wasn’t just me.
Forgive my persistence on this topic - I feel I was slightly fobbed off. How many people actually use the lyrics pasting function with bulk words? Surely the point of the popover is to be able to type lyrics in, as you would in a word processor?
Handy (although not very fully featured, and not very easy to read) though the edit lyric line is, it is by no means as convenient as the popover, and the fact that the paste-as-bulk-lyrics feature is over-riding common textual insertion is surely a red flag for interface design? When I’m composing, and typing away in the popover, it’s incredibly inconvenient that when I need to grab a different symbol, the popover disappears and it assumes I’m pasting a whole word and moves on to the next note. It’s even more inconvenient to write something else, then perform several clicks and have to do the same process into another tiny window (albeit at least without the paste-and-delete function)
I know you guys don’t like to hear criticism, but this surely needs addressing. I mean - can it not be as simple as an algorithm that decides whether you’re pasting more than one word, or a single character? There seem to be 100 different programming solutions for this one problem that I can think of…
/rant
I do this a LOT. Take a double choir work with Si-cut e-rat in prin-ci-pi-o over and over again. I can type it in once, then select the passage, filter the Lyrics (key shortcut), Copy to clipboard, then select another line and Command VVVVVVVVVVV. There are other tricks, too like Alt-click or Duplicate to Staff Below, but this is a massive timesaver for me.
I generally have the text editor, BBEdit, open in the background, which I use as a temporary text repository.
Sounds like its’ handy for baroque music then - I tend to use more wordy compositions, and lots of fiddly diacritics. It’s probably more useful for typesetting from manuscript, but not so much when composing directly into the app. It’s nonsense for me to copy and paste because I don’t know from one moment to the next where the syllables are going to go, and I like to see the process as it goes along (and it continually changes)/
shudder BBEdit - a remainder from the bad old days of OS 7 development…
I’m not sure that Baroque music has a monopoly on repeated instances of the same phrase!
What’s not to like about BBEdit? As the longest running Mac utility of all time, it must be doing something right.
But one man’s meat is another man’s poison.
Most common diacritics are easy to access on the Mac keyboard, though further afield, and something like PopChar (the second-oldest Mac utility!) works a treat.
BBEdit does some things great - it lost me though around 2004ish when it started introducing clickable blocks and templates. At its heart BBEdit is a decent text editor with some (at the time it became popular) useful autocomplete and auto-colouration functions. The interface didn’t quite move with the times though IMO and totally lost me when they started introducing a subscription model to pay for it. I enjoyed Textwrangler while it was around. Just hanging around doesn’t make it good! vi is much older (and excellent) but I suspect not many (of the vast bulk of) developers still use it over a more integrated development solution such as Xcode. Hey, remember Codewarrior?
Popchar’s great, but I can’t use it with the popover, because the popover disappears as soon as I summon it! Also - I have a machine and operating system worth thousands of pounds capable of inserting these glyphs easily - why should I have to buy yet another app to be able to insert them?
Without travelling too far along this tangent: I didn’t know they did a subscription. I see that’s only on the App Store. You can still buy a one-time licence from their website. You can use it in free mode (as the new BBedit Lite or Text Wrangler) without some of the more advanced functions.
No good to me any more but good to know 
Have decided to give up development for the time being. Plenty of other things going on. Scrivener is my text environment of choice.
Despite my various rants further up the thread, I do paste hyphenated text into the lyrics popover, and it does save me time.
And no, the popover couldn’t behave differently dependent on whether one is pasting a single character or not, because (in English) we have words such as “I” and “a”. Other languages have similar single-character words but they may be different characters. Dorico doesn’t know what language your lyrics are in.
1 Like
Yes but equally, if you past “I” into the box, why would it assume that there are more words coming? Even at the end of a sentence:
M and A and R and I
(an actual example of a lyric I recently used)
Surely if I pasted that whole sentence into the popover, it should just stop when it gets to I, and not assume I am going to paste something else? For the sake of some users having to press “space” to be able to press command-V again, this would save other users hours of fiddling!
Or a modifier key to paste in different ways? You guys like modifiers right? command-option-v = paste all into one lyric block. command-shift-V= paste and move on?
Or let’s go big and use computer learning to determine your habits - work out what language you’re in etc. why not?
literally hundreds of ways to solve this…
I’m reminded of Microsoft Excel - click on a cell and paste, it replaces the whole contents. Double click and you can paste into the contents of the cell that already exist. Two different types of input demarcated by a simple action… The popover feels like it should work like double clicking an excel cell.
Man, come to think of it, why should you need the popover to paste bulk lyrics? Just click a note and press command-v. Dorico could interpret your clipboard as text and place appropriately, leave the popover for us geeks…
…
Sorry - one more suggestion. I know I know, it’s beginning to look like trolling but seriously, this one’s really easy to implement:
popover language is essentially plain text markup language right? So use escape characters for unicode in the same way that HTML5 does:
&(code);
&#(number);
= spades ()
ȝ = lower case yogh ( ȝ)
er… haha, your message board of course does parse unicodes as HTML, so that should have read:
♠ = spades ()
ȝ = lower case yogh (ȝ)
Admittedly not the most user-friendly, but at least you would give easy access to unicode for those that need it…