Dorico for iPad Read mode suggestions

Dorico
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1

Hi,

I’d like to make a few improvement suggestions to Read mode in Dorico for iPad. Dorico for iPad is an absolutely brilliant tool for proofreading and making minor adjustments in the final stages of a project. I love that it looks and feels as big Dorico and the fact that it is practically speaking feature complete. My main use case is bringing projects from my computer to the piano, for proofreading, trying out key signatures with singers, etc, thus Read mode is very important to me. I don’t expect to use Dorico as a full-featured reader app for live use but would still like to see a few improvements. I’m on a 3rd generation iPad Pro, 12,9".

  1. Scrolling in Read mode is very unpredictable and flickery, at least on my iPad. Even if it was perfect, I don’t think I’d ever use it, I much prefer using tap gestures to do page turns, and the slider to navigate longer passages. The scrolling gestures also make it harder to do a clean tap gesture, so I often find myself failing page turns. I would love to be able to lock the score position and disable scrolling altogether. I think forScore and other dedicated reader apps have pretty much nailed this.

  2. It would be very cool to have a navigation menu to quickly navigate between flows, similar to the bookmarks menu in forScore. A similar for changing layout would also be nice, but less important IMO.

  3. I would prefer to have the music fill the page full screen, with an easy way to hide and show the toolbar, similarly to what forScore does.

  4. Improvements to handwriting would be very much welcome.

  5. As Dorico is more or less useless in vertical position, it would be very cool if flipping the iPad to vertical position automatically switched to Read mode. This would obviously need a preference to enable/disable.

  6. A dedicated transposition override feature available from Read mode (similar to the one in Scorch) would be very useful for testing out key signatures.

Thanks for considering!

Anders

2 Likes
2

Thanks for the feedback, Anders. I hope we will be able to dedicate some more time to Read view in the near future.

2 Likes
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I think you really need to see what ForScore does - it is the best reader for PDFs and for the work of a musician playing live.
Another really cool thing in ForScore is the ability to create jumps from a place in the score to another one (you can make as many as you want - so for example, if I have to jump from page 8 to page 1, I only have to insert 1 button and the jump is made).

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I’m certainly well aware of forScore, but Dorico for iPad is not intended to meet the same use cases as forScore. We recommend sharing PDFs from Dorico for iPad into forScore if you want to use the features of forScore with projects created with Dorico for iPad.

2 Likes
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In read mode I have this problem with some scores:

When I tap - + buttons in the upper right corner, the whole page is visible and it’s alright.

But when I tap on the right half of the page (tap gesture) the page turns; however the next page is shifted a little bit downwards - there’s some blank space under the navigation menu and the very bottom of the page is cut off.

Please make it consistent with how the - + buttons work. (maybe with the “disable scrolling” option?)