Dorico Manual: Explicit Commands

I am happy to have the Dorico Manual as a reference. That being said, I find that the information therein often hints at the way forward rather than stating explicit instructions.

Case in point: Looking for instructions about inputting clefs with the Clef Popover. Here is the page in the manual:

Note that there are two examples of clefs that could be input via the popover, but it is not entirely clear how the syntax relates to the rendered clefs. “bass” seems clear enough (bass clef). What exactly does G8ba mean? How does one input viola clef, octave-above or -below treble clef? This is not made explicit in the manual, and my attempts to guess at the proper input have not resulted in the desired clef.

Deep gratitude for the effort that has gone into the manual. Let’s work together to make it understandable for future generations.

There is a separate PDF document that lists extensive details of the popovers, including the alto clef 8 below.

No option, either in the panel or the popover, for C3 clef 8 above. But I think we’re all grateful for that.

Hi windrag, Thank you for pointing out that the example popover entries given in the “Inputting clefs” task don’t have the addition “for a X clef” - I usually do this for the inputting notations tasks, so I’m not sure why that’s missing here. I’ll get that added and it’ll be included when I publish the 3.5 manual.

I’m glad that in general the manual is useful to you! In all Steinberg manuals, information is segmented according to its type and purpose, both for consistency (certain types of information is always presented in a similar way) and to be easier/better for us authors to maintain accuracy across the entire document.

For inputting notations, there are tasks (which describe the steps you need to take in order to get to the end) and there are reference documents (which for Dorico, generally means tables of popover entries or overviews of dialogs). The reference page for the clefs and octave lines popover is linked at the bottom of the task, where the different clefs are listed with their associated popover entries. As Ben said, there is also a separate document available that just contains all the possible entries for all the popovers in Dorico. That document has been updated for 3.5.

I appreciate that having all the possible popover entries included alongside the steps might be welcome as a way of having all the information on one page, but when the popover lists get long (or in the case of e.g. the playing techniques popover, need to accommodate multiple different types of notations and require multiple separate tables), the page would get unwieldy and less helpful. I will make a note though to consider some sort of short sentence along the lines of “more popover entries are available”.

Speaking of which, the useful and simple popovers for c1, c2, c3, c4, c5 haven’t been included in the popover list.

Also, the French Violin clef doesn’t have a popover at all!

Indeed, they’ve now been added to both the separate popover document (along with some other missing entries) and the manual. Both of which will be updated online in due course.

Thanks, Lille and Ben. I can see now that the popover list is indeed linked on the page, under Related Reference. I’m not sure why I didn’t make that connection yesterday. I’ll make a point of looking in that section from now on.

Lillie, several times I’ve wished there were links in the doc. to the relevant YouTube video and even to specific times in the long (and excellent!) Discover Dorico videos. Any chance of that?

**Leigh

With new videos coming out all the time, this an awful lot for Lillie and her team to keep track of (in their copious free time, LOL),

Leigh, thanks for sharing your view - it’s always good to hear how people use the docs and where they would like changes. It’s been discussed amongst us a few times, and I think it’s something the manuals team do plan to include at some point, but I wouldn’t be able to say definitively if/when. However, this would most likely be the tutorial-style videos primarily, rather than the Discover Dorico sessions.