I’m engraving a published trumpet part into C trumpet, and one of the dynamics called for is sfp < sffz. Dorico won’t accept the sfp.
It turns sfp into “sub. fp”, and when I tried sfzp, it turned that into sfz, dropping the p.
Just reporting…
Enter your ‘sfp’, then select it, open the Properties panel, and change ‘Subito forte style’ to the ‘sf’ choice.
Ah, thank you, Daniel. I always forget that you can change dynamics characters in the Properties panel.
Thank you Daniel, your answer was very helpful and finding “subito forte style” in properties solved my problem with sfp as well. Any way I do not understand, why Dorico tries to be “smarter” then user. If user wants to enter sfp why not to allow him this instead of making him to search forum, to find right property, to change some settings? If I am not a first one, who was searching for such solution, there will be others as well. I would suggest Program behaviour could be little bit more intuitiv what actually Dorico is already famous for. It is not a big deal to write in popover sfp or fp subito per hand. But it would be a much faster way as to open properties and search for a right one.
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I have to agree with mipi. This is a most unintuitive way of doing something that one would expect to be as easy as creating fp. It took me a long time to find this trick, and it could be advertised in the manual. It needs to be featured prominently in the Operation Manual, where a search on sfp currently finds nothing.
I have wasted a lot of time looking for this information.
David
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Yes you’re right David, I’ve made a note. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for taking care of this, Lillie. 
Whatever criticisms I make of Dorico are meant in a spirit of encouragement to continue to improve what is already an exellent product. Your rapid response, and that of your colleagues, to our comments and the seriousness with which you take all of your customers’ problems is the reason why I am supporting and persevering with Dorico’s steep learning curve. People count, and I have confidence in your team.
This evening I needed to move a hairpin without another one further down the page moving in sync. So I did a Google search on Dorico group dynamics. This took me to https://steinberg.help/dorico/v1/en/dorico/topics/notation_reference/notation_reference_dynamics_grouping_together_t.html. I then had to click on https://steinberg.help/dorico/v1/en/dorico/topics/notation_reference/notation_reference_dynamics_linked_c.html#notation_reference_dynamics_linked_c to discover the difference between grouping and linking in Dorico’s jargon. Then I had to click on the links at the bottom of that page.
My point is that all this clicking was necessary because I didnt know the jargon. There must be an easier way!
David
You might want to uncheck the pictured option in order to prevent linking dynamics. For me, linking causes a lot of problems.
Unfortunately one thing there is that your search took you to the v1 manual (as denoted by the /v1/ in the url) whereas the most recent version is 3.5. The manuals team is looking into making it more obvious that newer docs are available when you land on an older manual.
We try to make it so that any page you land on provides the relevant information (“every page is the first page”) but we also have to segment information to make it useable. Tasks (that describe the steps required to do something) generally won’t contain lengthy explanations of what things are: that information is stored elsewhere, where there’s more room for accompanying pictures and further explanation. Those descriptive topics tend to have the nouns for titles (like “Groups of dynamics”), which I do try to link to from associated tasks. That’s also where you’re most likely to find synonyms or alternative terms for things (like “anacrusis” for pick-up bars). I also try to add as many relevant entries in the index and metadata based on how I’ve seen users describe things but there’s only so much that it’s realistic to add and I can’t pre-empt every possible way someone might think of different notations/functions!
It just so happens that in the introduction/explanatory topics for dynamic groups and linked dynamics there are explicit references to each other in the Notes. (As you’ll notice that comparison wasn’t there in the v1 docs, this is most likely one place where I’ve added text/links/keywords/pictures in response to reading questions and discussion from users.)
Thanks, notesetter!
This could, indeed, be useful. It is well hidden!
David
Yours is a Herculean task, Lillie – thank you!
Perhaps I should have put v.3.5 in the Google search field. I did notice that I frequently get sent to the v.2.2 manual.
As there are already 1500 pages in the manual and we are only at v.3.5, it might be good to prune it. Then a separate reference manual could list all the functions and refer users to the relevant page of the manual.
I feel that adding more information to the one manual is more daunting for the reader than helpful.
Knowing the jargon is a large part of being able to look things up. In my own daily experience, it is impossible for me to find computer parts on a website that is in German, if I only know the term in English, ands there is a lot of guesswork in finding the word I need. Such words are not even in online dictionaries. The situation is analogous to that with interrogating the Dorico manual: you can only get the answer you need if you know the correct question to ask!
Best,
David
Thanks as ever for the feedback David - you can trust that I consider all of this regularly, and I work alongside both the Dorico team and the manuals team in seeking to provide accurate and helpful documentation for users.
As I said, I spend quite a lot of time here and in the Facebook group, reading what users ask and how they ask it. I make notes about the terminology they use and frequently add additional/alternative keywords to relevant topics in order to improve search results, as well as more links between topics. However, there is a limit to what we can realistically do in that regard. If you’re really struggling to work out what you need and you don’t know the words for it, that’s where this forum comes in: you can share a picture or describe something, and chances are someone will understand the specifics of your request. (And chances are also that I will read it and update the docs for the future anyway.)
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The issue of how unintuitive this is was raised before the release of the second version.
Has is actually been addressed since then?
There haven’t been any changes to the way a subito fp dynamic is created recently, no.