If you have the Engraving panel open displaying options in effect for one score, then open another score, the engraving options panel does not update to reflect the options used in that second score.
If it is not possible for the Engraving panel to refresh itself, the next best thing would be for the Engraving panel to close when you switch to another score. Otherwise you could be looking at bad information and make some bad assumptions based on that.
This same thing may be true for Notations options.
Each project has its own set of options dialogs. You can tell which project a given dialog belongs to by looking at the title bar in the dialog, which includes the project name. If you want to see the engraving options for another project, open the dialog belonging to that project.
I find it rather confusing. It seems to me that is a hazard with the modeless dialogs. It is great to be able to leave the dialogs open when you are working on a single score. But when bouncing back and forth between scores, this seems like a detriment rather than a benefit. I often park the modeless dialogs on a second monitor, which is brilliant when using one score. But when using several scores, it doesn’t seem at all intuitive to me. If a dialog goes out of context, I’d think it should close, minimize, or at least grey itself and lock its contents until it is back in context.
I don’t mean to say this is a major problem. When it happened to me, I thought it was a bug. You say it is working as designed, and I can see that reasoning, but I think it could behave better than it does. Certainly not on my top 25 wish list though.
Just a brief plea for it to remain possible to refer to the dialogs from one project while tweaking the dialogs in another project.
I’ve spent much of this year working on projects that were originated by other people, and in some cases I’m having to maintain multiple files that will eventually tie together into the same finished product. Sometimes saving as default in one project and restoring saved defaults in another project isn’t entirely appropriate, which means manually cross-referencing to ensure consistency.
Sure, one day I’d love to see some sort of import/export bits of house style functionality, but in the meantime…
That’s actually what I was doing when I got tripped up on this unexpected behavior. I was working on one project and pulled up some of its notation options. I opened another score to see how its options differed. I expected the dialog to change to match the context of the currently selected score. That’s apparently not the design. I can understand that design choice, but I think some better visual cues are needed.