Hey there! I would love the ability to draw circles or boxes in Engrave mode. In the arrangement I’m writing, I want to circle a rest on beat 1 in the 1st measure of the chorus to draw attention to it since it’s unexpected.
Granted, I could do this after exporting in Adobe or have the band circle it on their tablets in forScore. But it would be so much easier to have that option in Dorico.
It could be similar to how MS Paint or Photoshop works – select shape, line thickness, and color. Bonus points if it could be linked to a note/measure.
Welcome to the forum, Dan. There are actually some ways to get custom graphics into Dorico, though not with the ease of something like Paint. All of them require you to source the actual graphic item from elsewhere as a starting point.
Create a Graphics Frame in Engrave mode, then import a .svg into it. The downside of this is that it is tied to a location on the page, and so it doesn’t move when the music does.
Create a custom Playing Technique with a shortcut of your choosing, and import your graphic as a custom glyph. Downside: PT’s don’t like to intersect the staves so you’ll have to position them by hand, and the collision avoidance may affect your layout.
Procure or create a custom font that has your symbol in it, so you can then type it as Staff Text. You can disable collision avoidance on it and it moves with the music, but it requires font-wrangling and there’s no flexibility in the symbol itself.
That said, specifically for rectangles you have several options within Dorico. You can get them as the border of a text frame, or of a Staff Text object (filled with spaces & carriage returns) or make them as a custom line. There’s also the auxiliary font AleBoxes that lets you type rectangles in a wide variety of ratios.
None of this is to undermine your feature request by the way, I think it’s a nice idea. Although with the exception of rectangles, the use cases might be a bit on the rare side to justify the development time. But you never know…
Or, if you need this only occasionally, do it the other way round: export your music as PDF, and add the shapes in a PDF editor. Even Apple’s Preview app can do that. I’ve used it in the past to add text remarks or a few bowings to an existing part that I didn’t want to ‘taint’ in Dorico.
Just for the sake of gathering the ideas here for the dev team to consider, I will add that for anyone using Dorico to make analysis examples, fluid addition of various shapes (especially including ovals and rounded-corner parallelograms) that can be color-framed and/or color-filled with adjustable opacity) would be a lovely bell and/or whistle.
Thanks!