I don’t like, how the music symbols editor behaves in some ways:
If there is only one symbol, changing the Offset has no effect to the placement in the music. Therefore, these controls should be greyed out, until there is a second symbol.
Symbols and Text can’t be scaled freely; therefore the X value of Scale should be greyed out as well.
I would love to see an apply button in this Editor to see my changes in the Score without having to open the Editor again every time I press OK.
I hope, that the possibility to scale symbols and text freely will be added in the future. I exchanged the Breath mark (comma) with the Short Caesura, but this symbol is too tall for my taste. If I reduce the size, it get’s to thin.
To be honest, I kinda hate this editor too, and all the other various places it shows up (playing techniques, chord symbols, etc.)
I think offset only works relative to the placement of the previous entry. This is annoying, and I agree the controls should be greyed out if they don’t do anything, but you can work around it by inputting a blank space first. For a single glyph, input a blank space, then the glyph. This way the glyph can be offset from the blank space.
The scaling factors just have to match. Instead of greyed out, maybe a lock icon could be visible there, with the other value autofilling once one value is input. If at some point in the future it becomes possible for these values to be independent, then clicking the lock icon will unlock the two values (Adobe software works like this) but for now a lock icon and autofill will make it clear that they are not actually independent.
Completely agree!
If you don’t mind me adding on to your post …
One of my biggest pet peeves about this editor, is that there’s no feedback to the user as to what glyphs are being used. If I go into Music Symbols and change the font of a glyph, next time I enter the editor there is no way for me to know what the font is! The only way I have figured out how to tell the font of a particular unknown glyph is to click the Save as Default star, and then search my userlibrary.xml to see what it saved as. There really needs to be some feedback to the user regarding the glyphs actually being used, like virtually every other DTP software.
The editor always defaults to showing the Standard Accidentals range on the right. This can be somewhat disastrous when editing chord symbols, because I would imagine most users have no idea that chord symbols do not use that range, but instead use the Standard Accidentals for Chord Symbols range. In Music Symbols, this really should update with the category I’m trying to edit. If I’m editing Clefs, chances are I’m going to want to see the Clefs range on the right, not Standard Accidentals. The Fingering category should show the Fingering range, and so on.
The Text tab always defaults to the Bar Repeat Count font style. Even just defaulting to Default Text Font would be a big improvement, but some sort of intelligent connection between the item being edited and the font style would be very helpful, i.e. the Text tab for the Edit Chord Symbol Component editor should default to the Chord Symbols Font, etc.
I again ran into the problem of the lack of any information about the font of the symbol being shown in the editor. The only way I can be sure that the font is what I want it to be is to delete the symbol and enter it again. Revamping this editor to correct the items mentioned in the previous two posts would be in the top items in my Dorico wish list.
Some late added peeves:
There is no undo action possible, or if there is, I have not found where.
The unit of the offsets is unclear. Do they relate to staff line spacing? And when you look at a corresponding doricolib file, the units seem to be quite different.
It is not clear (for me anyway) what attachments are for unless you need 2 components to link themselves on a common point. Some guess might be made for other useful cases like 2 components distant by a fixed vector, but should it really be compulsory as soon as there are 2 components? There is no way to select no attachment. And I have never been able to merge attachments and offsets to implement the fixed distance.
It seems that the documentation on the editor has not evolved since Dorico 3, while there would be some need for it. For instance at least a Show Attachments button disappeared, and even if the Cut-out tab existed, it is not even mentionned. But actually it is mentionned in some variant of that section like Accidentals Editor (and this one has been updated for version 5!). Which is nice, but it means the doc writer has to do repetitive work and that a user could miss the useful information. Could not the Symbol Editor help have subsections for the different categories?
I feel rather the same, but I think I arrived (painfully) to a better comprehension, FOr what it is worth, I will give it her, and welcome confirmations and/or corrections.
Here is the understanding to which I came:
As a survival rule, I never use the mouse inside the editor grid, neither to select, or move, too many uncomprehensible things have happened. I only use widgets external to the grid.
The unit of the editor grid is 1/5th of the space between 2 consecutive lines of a staff.
As long as you have only one component, all is simple. The X, Y offsets are the offsets of the component “hot spot” to the Axis Origin.
As soon as you add a second one, it becomes more complex. You will need to remember in what order the components were added, since each component will be positioned relatively to the previous one. If you are editing a symbol created by somebody else, this may not be easy to guess, the Select arrows will give you the correct cycle, but since they are cyclic, they will not help you to guess which is the first. The first is the one that allows you to move everything synchronously by changing its offsets.
As much as I dislike the Attachments, it is currently impossible to edit without understanding then. When you add a 2nd component, automatically it is attached to the previous one by the default attachment Baseline right to Baseline Left
(if your components are not text characters, Baseline should not be used, but this is interpreted as Top right to Top Left)
so the 2nd component will appear stuck to the left of the 1st one, with X and Y offsets of 0.
The position of every component but the first one is computed by applying their attachment to the (computed) position of the previous one.