Editing symbol for tenuto

[FredGUnn]

@Andro

But do you really think this is a good user interface design? It’s confused me heavily, and to be honest I think it is plain weird. I don’t recall using any other program that shows this sort of behaviour. I’d expect the properties of the glyph I am editing to show in the properties panel, not the default for accidentals. Maybe this is my conceptual error to regard the right hand side as a properties pane. But I strongly maintain this is weird.
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I think you can rationalise it away, but it’s a sub-optimal experience, to put it mildly.

+1 to all of this. In all the DTP programs I use, if you select a glyph, the program tells you what font and size the glyph is. Here’s InDesign in a situation where I’m mixing text and a tenuto. I highlight the tenuto and InDesign tells me what it is. Illustrator works simlarly.

Finale’s Symbol Selection dialog is … not great, but you can at least select any glyph and see what font it is. (Size adjustment on previous / next window.) For elements that use the Expression Designer, like Dynamics, Tempo Marks, Rehearsal Marks, etc, you can select any glyph in the window and immediately see what font and size it is.

Dorico seems to be a bit of an outlier here, and it’s not helpful to the user. Even if it had a search function, you can’t even use Library Manager to find out what font a tenuto glyph is.

I think the only way to find out what font an glyph once the user has edited it, is to hit the Save as Default star, then manually search for that glyph in your userlibrary.xml file for the GlyphPrimitiveEntityDefinition that will tell you the Font Style. Not very helpful nor user friendly.

The Edit Music Symbol window also doesn’t logically anticipate what the user wants. Clearly this code is reused in lots of places in the program (Edit Playing Technique, Edit Chord Symbol Component, etc.) but it really should be “smarter” and adapt to what the user most likely wants to do. If I’m under Edit Music Symbols / Articulations, it’s not likely I’m going to want to add a glyph from the Standard Accidentals range, or want to add Bar Repeat Count text, yet that’s what Dorico shows me. Defaulting to the Articulation range and Default Music Font would be much more helpful. Same with all the other categories. You want to modify your Dynamic glyphs? Ok, here’s a set of Accidentals and some Bar Repeat Count text for you to work with, LOL!

I’ve already griped at length about all the issues with this editing window and chord symbols here, but nothing has changed since that post, so all those criticisms still stand too.

@pianoleo

(e.g. either you should be able to scale X and Y independently or it should be a single property)

Agreed. It could simply be a single “scale factor” property, or if there are plans to be able to adjust X and Y independently in the future, there could be lock/unlock icons to show this is currently locked and the other variable could autofill with any edit to the other, like Adobe’s below: