A small feature request:
It is common in many house styles, especially in musical theatre in the USA, to have instrument and mute changes within a border and often the text is in all caps. Currently, there doesn’t seem to be any sort of option in the properties panel of instrument or mute changes to do this. I’m currently creating a text object for every change. I’ve searched pretty extensively to see if this has been mentioned before posting here, and maybe someone can point me in the right direction if I’m missing something. Thanks!
It would likely be a case of altering the Paragraph Style to include a border. Unfortunately that functionality doesn’t yet work as intended - Borders do indeed appear in Engrave > Paragraph Styles but aren’t respected for items like Instrument Changes that are automatically drawn. This is on the development team’s to-do list for a future version of Dorico.
One thing you could do is build a Custom Paragraph Style that is bordered by default. If you then Save it As Default (the Star icon at the bottom left corner of Paragraph Styles) it’ll show up in Preferences > Key Commands so that you can assign a keyboard shortcut directly to it. While this won’t save you having to manually type out text objects for each change, it will save you the hassle of going down to the properties panel and setting the Border property each time you have to do one of these text objects.
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Thank-you for the detailed reply! I’m glad this is a feature to be implemented soon, and I’ll use your tip for the paragraph style in the meantime. Thanks!
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By the same token, is there no way currently to change the size of the text (e.g. for mute changes) or add a background color, without doing a work-around?
You can define your own playing techniques in Library > Playing Technique and use a different font style than the default Playing techniques font.
Thank you. Yes, that solution will allow me to control font family, style, and size, which is probably good enough for now. It does not allow the definition of an enclosure, although I can probably make that work with one of the fonts that allows you to construct enclosures as specified within the text string.
It does not allow text color or background color. Many of the musicians I write for now use pads almost exclusively, so color is becoming an important part of modern engraving.