Pretty much all of the different regions in Dorico (chord, slash, one-bar repeat, etc.) don’t really function the way a composer’s mind works. Prior to the creation of Dorico, if one wanted to copy measure 4 to measure 12, you just copied it. Back in the hand copying days, the shorthand abbreviation “col 4” with a downward arrow in bar 12 instructed the copyist to simply copy the material from bar 4 into bar 12 for the affected staves. Even in Finale, a Staff Style displaying Slash Notation wouldn’t copy the entire Staff Style region, but rather just what was assigned in that measure. Now in Dorico I can’t just think “copy bar 4 into bar 12”, I have the added step of confirming if any regions in bar 4 are included or else it may not copy accurately without splitting them first.
In a copy and paste situation, Chord symbol regions won’t copy unless I’ve actually clicked on the chord symbol region bar. Conversely, Slash notation regions will always include the entire region, but there is no visual feedback in the form of orange highlighting that this will be the case. One-bar repeat regions always copy the entire region as well, but at least they are highlighted in orange to alert the user that they are selected. Three different approaches to handling three different types of regions is quite inconsistent and not at all intuitive IMO. If one of these regions happens to go back to the initial time signature, you are actually copying that as well even though you only drag-selected notes in bar 4 and weren’t anywhere near the initial time signature when selecting items.
Let’s say I want to copy the contents of bar 4 into bar 12, so I drag-select the entire contents of bar 4 as shown:
It really is not intuitive at all, nor desired, that Alt-clicking bar 12 will result in this:
I understand that the three types of regions I mentioned above all function differently with regard to copy and pasting, but the treatment of these really should be consistent IMO. As a feature request, I would really love to see an option to have all of the various types of regions “auto-split” while copying when partial regions are selected. There are probably issues I haven’t thought through with this, but I would really love to see drag-selecting the contents of bar 4 and Alt-clicking bar 12 result in this:
Some sort of auto-split option for regions would be a very desirable option to have, at least for me. I’d love to go back to just thinking “copy bar 4 into bar 12” without worrying about what will copy where.