First of all, congratulations on the Dorico 6 release. Lots of exciting new features here.
I tried out the proofreading feature yesterday. It was quite helpful, but I did notice some UX frictions that decreases the usability.
To make the discussion concrete, here is a simple, reproducible scenario that became annoying quickly. Suppose you have a long enough score that the whole score does not fit in one screen, and that the list of proofreading suggestions also does not fit in one screen. Now:
Pick a proofreading task somewhere in the middle of the suggestions list.
Address the suggestion, which will trigger a recomputation of the suggestions list.
Observe that the list of suggestions showing on screen is no longer relevant to the part of the score showing on screen, because the proofreading recomputation reset the scrolling I did in Step #1.
I think the crux of the issue is that I see no apparent connection between the task list on the proofreading section and the part of the score I’m viewing on screen. It would be really helpful to have an option to make the proofreading section “follow” the score, where the task list would auto-scroll to show the suggestions relevant to the part of the score showing on the screen.
Building in this awareness could also enable useful new features such as highlighting on the score all proofreading suggestions on the active portion of the score (i.e., the part that’s currently showing on screen), instead of the more computationally intensive alternative of highlighting all proofreading suggestions throughout the entire score.
Perhaps all of this is already doable and I just don’t know how yet. If that’s the case, I’d be more than happy to learn. Once again, congratulations to the Dorico team and thank you for taking the time to read through my feature request.
I find the proofreading feature incredibly useful. However, as others have mentioned, it would be helpful if there were a way to let Dorico know when a suggestion has been reviewed and no further reminders are necessary. For example, it’s not uncommon to indicate a mid-note bow change to a string player, but the proofreader flags this with: *“Up bow technique has no effect as it does not coincide with a note onset.”
I love the new clear button, but there’s something weird about the button itself. When I try to click it, it disappears momentarily, then reappears when I’ve moved my mouse to its sweet spot.
Also, they eye icon is tiny!
I get a lot of warnings that the “hairpin is cut short by p.” I look at the music and everything looks fine. Am I entering hairpins wrong?
That’s it. Besides these few quibbles, I really think this latest version of the proofreading tool is fabulous. Thank you for inventing something I didn’t know I needed!
As I use the proofreading tool a bit more, I find myself wondering: Could the proofreading list be behave similarly to an email inbox? That is, you click your mouse on the first suggestion in the list and the suggestion box becomes highlighted in the list and the bouncing arrow shows you the problem in your score. If you decide you want to ignore it, you simply hit delete. If you want to let it stay in the list, you hit the down arrow to go to the next suggestion. Not only would this simplify much of your work to deleting or down-arrowing, but the highlighted boxes would help you keep track of where you are in the proofreading list.
The currently selected issue is highlighted, with a light blue outline, although I think that’s easy to miss. And you can set your own shortcuts for next/previous/ignore in Preferences > Key Commands > Setup.
Chances are, yes. If you delete the immediate dynamic (the p or whatever), you’ll no doubt see that the hairpin then snaps to a note further on in the music. Shorten it with Shift+Alt+left arrow.
I find a lot of the things the proofreading tool picks up are not necessarily visible problems. I’ve had things like dynamics being a sixteenth off where they should be that trigger the alert. The alert is still probably really good to have in this case though, because I’ve seen before cases where slight positioning errors like this may be invisible with some layouts but then as bar widths change due to layout changes or music edits, and bars move to different systems, the you may suddenly have a visible issue in the part or something where it was not previously visible. So it is good to know about these things.
