Hello,
One thing I have run into many times - and I don’t think there has been a thread for this that I have seen - is the behaviour of custom bracketing, especially with large ensemble scores like orchestral scores. There are many situations where I really just want to do a custom bracketing for the entire score and just have it work and be consistent on all pages. However, I start running into issues when I have things like condensing, hiding staves, doubling players, divisi staves, etc. I can do a custom bracketing on page 1 that looks fine there, but then I go to page 3 or something, which has a different set of staves visible than page 1 and Dorico does not properly do the brackets there because the players involved were not appearing on page 1 and it doesn’t have enough information to figure out what I want there. So then I have to do an override there, and really I end up needing to override the bracketing on every single page of the score to correct any issues by hand. In this case I really need my systems to be locked, so that if I make an edit to the music it doesn’t end up moving to another system, or I may have to redo the bracketing overrides.
The “workaround” for this issue that I have found at the moment is to forcibly show everything on page 1 - the full roster of instruments, nothing hidden, and as many divisi staves as you might possibly use in the score, and then do the custom bracketing in engrave mode and then afterwards manually change back the appearance of page 1 back to how it should look. In this situation, the brackets and braces are correct on all future pages of the score because the first page contains information for everything. It is a bit of a pain to do this, as I am purposely making the first page look completely wrong for a short time, sometimes with large numbers of empty divisi staves, just so that I can set up the bracket groups in a way that will work globally, and then fixing the first page again afterwards to appear again as it should. As a result of how much of a pain it is, I will often not do this, and instead will just make the overrides page by page only when the score is basically finished as one of the last steps.
I’m not sure exactly what the solution is, but ideally there might be some kind of view or window where you could apply bracketing to the theoretical full score as it would look with all possible staves shown without having to go through this.
Thanks!