Surely this is because ‘?’ is not allowed in file names on Mac either, as I suggested earlier. No? That is why I asked you a couple of times to submit the file name. [But I am not a Mac expert.]
No, it isn’t, because as you can see in the video (specifically in the preview within the filename recipe) in the OP, Dorico’s clever enough to strip the question mark out of the filename.
…and I’ve just confirmed here that Dorico can successfully strip a question mark out of the project name and export the file, with no crashes:
Why on earth would I want not to solve the problem? Sorry that I didn’t know that that the reports “piles up”.
Dorico Diagnostics.zip (1.5 MB)
Googling “using question marks in file names Mac” returns the answer: “It’s okay but not smart”.
So Dorico will let you use the question mark in a file (project) name for sure but will strip the question mark on a subsequent pdf export. That’s not good, because it open up for errors, so either it should not be allowed to use question mark in any names OR the pdf file should be named correctly.
I think.
I wouldn’t call Dorico clever in this situation, but okay since it’s you!
It would be ridiculous to not be able to put a question mark in the name of project on the page. Dorico presumably strips it out of file names in order to avoid operating system (and for that matter cloud storage) problems with question marks in file names.
I’m not sure what errors this opens up, but seemingly this isn’t the problem here. Hopefully the diagnostics file leads to a solution to the crashes.
Yes of course it should be possible - and indeed it is - to have question mark in the title of a flow or project. But let’s agree about that Dorico doesn’t strip out the question mark in file names - ONLY in the name of the exported PDF, that’s different.
And let me just say this, not to offend any of the participant in this thread but merely to summarize many of the discussions here:
As a Cubase, Nuendo and Dorico user for years this is the place I will often turn to for help, complaints and suggestions.
And in this respect I think the forum works fine, but maybe some of you - answering to peoples complaints and need for help - could improve the communication by following this guideline:
Read the OPs post. If there are pictures/video, have a look, maybe more than once. If you don’t know that much about the subject, maybe sit tight and wait for someone with insight to answer. Try not to assume that a person with a problem, that you never had is using the software a way, that it’s not intended to be used. And that he/she hasn’t read the manual. Although that might often be the case!
I could give you a short resume of a case from another company, - EPSON illustrating the wasted time and effort as a result of bad communication habits, but I will skip that and return to writing some arrangements in Dorico, leaving any QUESTION(marks) in any filename, isn’t that a good idea?
Regards Musicmind
I was tempted to “like” that post since I agree with your advice in principle. Many times I have aborted a reply when I’m not sure of the facts, or whether I will be helpful, or that I really understand the problem.
But this thread starts out by throwing suspicion on the wrong characters, and the video added no information because you already mentioned the crashes in the text.
If there was any clue in the video … well, the text in the export dialog was a blur, completely illegible at first. I had to go fullscreen, manually reset the resolution to 1024, zoom in further on my screen, and rewind and slow it down to half speed in order to have time to read the filename. And I still would not have noticed or suspected the substituted question mark because I didn’t see the original filename anywhere else.
So I think both sides are at fault in this case. We can pay closer attention but you can also “help us help you” (such as the nice screenshot in post #19).
By the way, we still haven’t figured out the actual cause of this crash, have we?
Unfortunately, the diagnostics provided by Stig don’t contain any crash logs, so I’m still unable to say why the application is crashing.
The problem with the ? character (on Windows) is that the operating system treats it as a wildcard character. The asterisk * in a filename will cause problems for similar reasons. (Both conventions inherited from MS-DOS back in the Late Neolithic).