Export/Import Preferences?

Is it not possible to export/import preferences? I use Dorico on two machines, and it’s a pain to have to remember to change preferences on both to keep them in sync.

It would be nice to bring all the preferences from one machine to another, or keep several different sets of named preferences to apply when needed.

Are you on Windows or on macOS?
In the second case, I can help you locate the files to copy between the machines.
There should also be other posts about this.

Do you mean application preferences, or things like Engraving Options?

You can use the Library Manager to import options from another document, and then save them as defaults.

There is a slight risk in copying the preferences file, as it contains file paths for Autosave, Backup folders, and other things. If these paths are not the same, then that might cause problems until you manually correct them.

On Windows, the application-level preferences are in %appdata%\Steinberg\Dorico 5, which is the same as c:\Users\<username>\AppData\Roaming\Steinberg\Dorico 5. You would probably want the following files:

  • preferences.xml
  • userlibrary.xml
  • keycommands_en.json (or the appropriate 2-letter code for your language)
  • any xml file with the word options in the filename

To @benwiggy 's point, preferences.xml contains hardcoded file paths. If your two machines are set up the same way (same username, same Dorico installation path, same location of your Dorico projects), then you should be fine.

As he also indicates, document-level settings are stored with each document and can be transferred between documents with the Library Manager.

I had issues with this just yesterday.

Unless I’m going mad, userlibrary.xml seems to be a legacy file - it doesn’t actually update and removing it does no harm.

User library stuff can be exported to a .doricolib fle, generated from Library>Export Library. This does not update automatically though, so can’t be stored in e.g. Dropbox.

I’d love to know where exactly Dorico writes the user library stuff.

I mean, of course, everything under Edit > Preferences.

I understand about some of the preferences being “unique”, but maybe those could be left out of the export. Would not be hard to do.

At a minimum, exporting key commands would be great.