This is not a bug report, but rather a comment in how Dorico was designed and a big problem that arises from it:
I absolutely love the fact that all percussion instruments are separated into their own staff and then seamlessly incorporated into one Percussion staff. However, when working with large percussion sections, of say 10 instruments per player, the score becomes absurdly big! Case in point, I was testing Dorico by trying to orchestrate a Concerto using a pretty standard Orchestra (woodwinds, brass, piano, harp, V1, V2, Viol, Cello, Basses and two percussionist playing around ten instruments each). Now, in my usual notation software I do this on my 27’ monitor rotated to portrait and this allows me to see the full score vertically and about 10 bars at a time. In Dorico however, because of its design philosophy of having each instrument separated into their own staff, I cannot see the full score unless I zoom out so much that the score becomes illegible. Perhaps there should be an option to have all instruments played by the same player in one staff or perhaps this is too late at this stage of development…
Another problem that arises is that the “part” is named according to the 1st instrument played as opposed to for example Percussion 1.
Finally, the other issue is that all staves still appear in engraving mode, as opposed to the joint version in the print part. If we are to work on layout and appearance in Engraving Mode, then surely we should be able to see the final result here (especially considering there’s no zoom capability in Print Mode).
Although I am not using Dorico any more at this point I’d be interested to hear from the community and the developers if they know a workaround for these issues or if they have other (better) ways of working with these problems.
