Dorico 2.0 Wish List: Text Improvements

[tonywardarts]

While the Dorico team is in the planning stages of 2.0, I’d like to add my requests for the next update, and they’re big ones for my line of work. In the interest of being more digestible than, say, the 95 Theses on the door at Wittenburg, I’m doing this one post at a time.

Text and lyric improvements. I think text entry in Dorico is a bit of a mixed bag. There is genius there, but also some clunkiness. Here are some ideas from this user, who also spends a great deal of time in apps like Adobe CC:

1. Keyboard shortcuts for bold, italic, etc.

2. The option to set alternate text styles for elements like lyrics in different flows or layouts. When I compose a new liturgical piece, Dorico gives me the flexibility to keep the full score, parts, and the congregational reprint in the same file. (Yay!) However, it’s best to keep reprint lyrics set to a safe font like Times New Roman, so I’d love to be able to make that happen separately.

3. A two-column format for text styles in Engrave, like we have for paragraph styles and so many other options screens. It’s so frustrating to have to close and open that dialogue for every style I want to edit, especially when setting up a new doc. I’ve saved template docs for my main work, but, of course, that is not always relevant to a project.

4. Lyric cut and paste. I miss this from Sibelius and Finale.

5. Lyrics in Galley View: PLEASE adjust the justification of lyrics in galley view from “Unyielding Absolute” to “Bottoms Up,” i.e., justify verses closest to staves. In my work, I do multiple choral arrangements for a single piece, usually for groups of verses. Having a verse 6 in the middle of the next staff down, especially because each syllable can be accidentally selected, is supremely annoying.

[Romanos]

I’d love it if they changed the anchor point for the text options pop up to the center point of frames. I often zoom way in when working on smaller things, and when you have, for instance, a copyright bar at the very bottom of the page and you zoom in, the text options bubble is anchored to the far left anchor point and goes off screen (when typing on the right anyway). Hopefully that made sense. Zoom in enough, it is out of view. At least if it is on the center point, your less likely to lose it one way or the other.

[Pianoplayah]

Yes please to keyboard shortcuts for bold/italic etc. If it’s possible, I would also love love LOVE automatic wrapping on Shift-X text objects. For musical theatre, if I’m putting in dialog over a vamp, for instance, It would be great if the lines would automatically wrap when they hit the edge of the music frame. Also, when you have large chunks of text in between staves it starts to really confuse Dorico’s auto-formatting. For instance, if I have dialog before the start of the number/over an opening vamp, it needs to sit in between the title frame and the first system. If that text box gets too big, it rolls off the top of the page. That happens with any large text block at the top of any page. See attached screen grabs!

Thank you!!

[dspreadbury]

We won’t add automatic line wrapping to Shift+X text items, I’m afraid: you would need a text frame for that. However, there is clearly a need for a text frame that is associated with a particular music frame, and that’s something we are likely to work on in the future.

[steveparker]

“text frame that is associated with a particular music frame, and that’s something we are likely to work on in the future.” Yay!