My wishlist for 5 mostly comes from another one of our wish lists here: Choral Particularities
Pretty sure everything I said there still applies (I haven’t yet had a chance to explore D4, but just from watching all the YouTube videos, I think these are all still relevant), but here are the sparknotes.
- Option to automatically fit very long single-note lyrics (usually for chanting) within the barline.
1a. Not mentioned in the other thread, but I dare say, maybe even the ability to put a line break in a single lyric, again for chanting, but chanting with paragraphs
- A small overhaul on mensurstriche. It’s great, but throw anything slightly non-standard at it, and it quickly becomes not sufficient (e.g. double choir should not have barlines connecting the two choirs, only barlines within choirs. Not currently possible). See the other thread for the full skinny on mensurstriche.
- Reordering instruments on a per-flow (or even mid-flow) basis.
- Linked asterisks/footnotes that automatically stay on the correct page.
- This one’s hard to know how to summarize it, because it could be tremendously generalizable, but my particular need is very specific. Sometimes I need to attach extra characters to verse numbers, as is commonly done in hymnals (e.g. a big underline to make a visual separation between every third verse). See the other thread for pics. Though, more broadly speaking I’d be just as happy with a very general feature that allowed you to attach any arbitrary thing to any other arbitrary thing (e.g. click on any element in engrave mode, and from there open up the symbol editor for that specific instance of that item. That’s not a thing already, right?).
There are a few things not in my list in the other thread, but they’re also on my wish list:
- Playback scrubbing
- Cutaway score support. (and/or any other functionality from F*****'s Staff Styles feature worth stealing)
- (native) Box notation, with all the trimmings.
- A simple in-program design-your-own symbol editor (vector graphics)
- Along the lines of my #4 above, I’d love to be able to attach master page overrides to certain musical locations (like the beginning or end of a flow for instance) instead of having to go by page number, which can easily change. For instance, say I need a big dedicated title page for Act II of an opera. It should go at the end of the last flow of Act I or at the beginning of the first of Act II. Right now, if I add or subtract from Act I, the title page doesn’t automatically move accordingly.
I’ve got some other little nitpicks here and there, but they’re mostly minor and mostly things that I’ve really only ever had come up once or twice. Maybe one day when all the big stuff’s tackled (i.e. when my colleagues can no longer avoid my Dorico evangelism by saying “well there’s just a few big things that I need that F*****/S******* can do that Dorico can’t.”), maybe then I’ll dig out that list 