Dorico version hint when opening a project

I am aware that this is a minor feature request at the moment but in the long run I believe it will be necessary.

Now that there are two very distinct Doricos versions and it will surely not stop there, would it be possible to have a hint when you open a project telling whith which version the file has been created?
It would be also great if the file would be opened and converted to the new format with a new title and if the old file could say untouched.

New added or improved features may considerably change the look of a score and this is not always wanted.
At the moment, testing Dorico 2, I manually add a "-d2"suffix to the file name so it’s not a great deal but at some point in the distant future it will be more and more difficult to remember with which version a file has been created.

This seems like a good idea.

There are other idioms available. Microsoft office programs display “[Compatibility Mode]” in the title bar when dealing with older versions of the file format, but generally load and save transparently without changing the format, only bringing up a warning message when something is included in the document that wouldn’t work in the current format (and only then offering to convert).

Adobe Creative Suite is much more oppressive, automatically updgraidng an old file format to a new one on opening and then automatically saving in a non-backwards-compatible format the first time you hit Ctrl-S. I suspect it’s a commercial decision to encourage everyone to update to the newest version of the software or be unable to open documents from others who have already updated.

I might be misremembering, but I think years ago Sibelius announced that they were making their file format FORWARDS-compatible, which was extraordinary — essentially leaving gaps in the file format to be filled by future features, and in theory making it possible for any version of the software to open even much newer documents. If I remember correctly, that aspiration survived exactly 1 version and was then abandoned… understandably!

Dorico cannot open a project in something like Office’s “compatibility mode”: as soon as you open a project in a later version, it is automatically converted to the latest version.

We do not store the version in which a file was originally created: all we know when opening a project is the version in which it was last saved. We could show this in a message when first opening a project in a later version, but there’s no way for a new version of Dorico to retain the behaviour of the old version.

This is interesting. It’s more like the Adobe behaviour, then. So if I create a file in Dorico 1.x, then open and save it in 2.0, can it thereafter be opened in 1.x?

Yes, it happens to be the case that it can, but of course it’s not guaranteed that it will appear the same, e.g. things like slash regions, divisi, etc. will all be lost when opening the project in 1.2.10; provided you don’t resave the file it won’t be changed, but if you resave it in 1.2.10, then all of those things will be removed.

This would be already very usefull.