FEATURE REQUEST: "Feature Requests & Suggestions" subsection for Dorico Forum?

Not a full solution, but if you just need to add an extra note or two after the note that is currently highlighted (in orange), and you don’t want to go into note input mode, just press R. It will repeat the previous note, and you can then move it up and down and change its duration as needed, all without entering Note Input mode.

Valid solution for sure- I guess at the end of the day I find value in filling the page with notes as quickly as possible and then editing rhythms and pitches to match the actual output, which a series of “Repeat” commands will definitely get me closer to, thanks!

Agreed Mike, would have to be a massive time commitment to develop this however i’m super excited for that day :slight_smile:

I love how Dorico has editorial style markings for slurs (slurs with a small slash through them to indicate they were added by an editor). I can’t seem to find the equivalent with hairpin cresc/decresc. Does that exist (yet)? I would love to see it. And for more editorial-specific options in general.

I would love the ability to be able to adjust the vertical staff spacing on a per-staff basis in galley mode. If I’m experiencing a collision between two staves, seems like I shouldn’t have to increase the vertical spacing of all staves in galley mode just for visual clarity. Thanks!

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Hello everyone. I’m a recent Dorico convert from Finale and use Finale, Sibelius and now Dorico professionally in the film/tv/video game world as an orchestrator and copyist. Here are a few features that would be really useful for us to be able to duplicate our preferred house style in Dorico and speed up our workflow. Thanks for all that you’ve done so far to make the program great. We’re very excited about this new chapter for our office with Dorico as our primary notation software.

Forgive me if any of these features already exist as I’m still learning the program, but I’ve done my due diligence and haven’t found solutions. If they do, please point me in the right direction.

  1. It would be really helpful to allow Font Styles to have different settings between scores and parts. This would be particularly useful for metronome markings, where the size on a large score would ideally be different (larger) than on the parts.
  2. Our “let ring” / l.v. ties from our House Style have a very different look from standard ties for ease of sight-reading. The shape is different and the placement relative to the note head is also different. I’ve learned how to have Dorico show laissez vibrer ties in the Properties panel and also learned that there are settings for these that effect their minimum length in Engraving Options, which is helpful, but it appears their overall look and shape can only be altered in a way that affects all ties globally. It would be wonderful if there were a way to alter all aspects of laissez vibrer ties (such as their thickness, curvature and placement relative to the note head) independently from standard ties.
  3. From what I can tell, staves with slash regions cannot be condensed. This is problematic for us, particularly when there are aleatoric sections in a score. We’ll often use slashes to show time while an entire section (all flutes, all horns, etc.) perform some type of aleatoric effect. It’s not practical or necessary to show a staff for every player in these cases.
  4. Our house style is to show cautionary accidentals within 4 measures of the accidental that is being cancelled (typically naturals following accidentals since the vast majority of scores we work on do not use key signatures). This is extremely helpful for sight reading in a studio setting, and very time consuming and error prone for us to add in manually on every part. It would be wonderful if an option could be added to customize how many measures automatic cautionary accidentals apply for.
  5. Our house style (and industry standard) is to have bar numbers centered below every bar in both scores and parts. It seems that the vertical placement below the staff for multi-rest bar numbers can only be adjusted in Engraving Options, and not for each Layout like all the other bar numbers. This is problematic because we would prefer for the vertical placement of bar numbers to be farther below the staff on scores than on parts, which results in the multi-bar rest bar numbers not aligning vertically with the others in either the score or the parts.

Thanks again for all that you do!

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Library Manager is what you need: Steinberg
It is really powerfull. You can control all the Dorico settings.

I personally use a score as a template and duplicate layouts using the template manager. It’s very easy to get the same layout for all my scores

In early music, the figured bass numbers can exceed 4 numbers.
Please increase to at least 8 if not more.

Thank you

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Maybe this already exists, so please forgive me if it does. I love Dorico’s powerful part “extraction” feature. However, it seems like every person who needs parts in their score also needs the parts to contain reasonable page turns. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if Dorico had a feature that automatically searched for ideal page turns. For instance, where there is at least 1-2 bars of rest in the part. This would save really everyone who needs parts from having to do this manually with each part every time.

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A great deal of keyboard music, in my case piano, has multiple voices in one hand which causes Dorico to add rests in those voices. I end up spending a great deal of time going back and removing the “extra” rests. It would be great if there was a Clean Up Rests feature that would identify and remove these rests automatically.


One of the tricky things here is how to distinguish between the half note rest in RH which you don’t want and the eighth note rest in the LH which you do want.

You can certainly select a section of music, filter down to one voice (or filter to exclude one voice), and then use Edit > Remove Rests to get rid of all the rests in the selected voices – but this won’t solve the above issue. Or you can filter down to just rests in a section, then Ctrl+click to deselect the ones you want to keep, and then do Edit > Remove Rests. If you’re currently removing rests one at a time, this might be quicker.

Thanks @asherber. I agree that this isn’t something that requires a simple solution. It would need knowledge of what rests to keep and what rests to delete. It’s almost never true that all rests in a selection would need to be removed. I think by the time I select all rests in a section and then Ctrl+click the ones I want to keep, it’s probably just as fast as selecting the unwanted ones and removing them. I’m using a Stream Deck so it’s just one push of a button to remove the rests.
It is quite time consuming regardless when I’m working on a lengthy piece of 15 minutes or more. This would be a pretty advanced feature I guess, but I would also assume that a lot of people would make use of it.

I would say that this is opinion rather than knowledge, which is why I think it would be difficult to automate. Both rests in your example above are technically correct; you don’t feel that the first one is necessary, but someone else might disagree.

FEATURE REQUEST: Independent global positions in score and parts respectively for tempo markings and rehearsal marks would turn my layout process into some pretty smooth sailing. In most cases there is no good compromise between positions in score and parts, and manually adjusting is just messy.
The discussion is here:

Feature Request: Show two decimal places (or three) in inches for vertical staff spacing in Engrave mode.

I understand that there is little hope that there will ever be an “optimize staves” feature in Dorico any time soon, if ever. Since that is the case, would it be possible to make the manual adjustment process easier for those of us who work in Imperial measurements?

The vertical spacing sliders only show to the first decimal of an inch: .6, .7, .8, etc. While it looks like in millimeters you get MM.m, or a much finer visible control in as you visually slide the staff up and down. The distance between .6" and .7" on a page of notation is much greater than the millimeter increments.

As part two of this request, would it be possible to manually turn off / toggle off the blue and red highlight on the systems? Same thing with manually turning off/toggling off frame outlines and other “invisibles” that can be hidden with the ~ mark?

With all of that clutter on the page it is really difficult to actually do the manual adjustment because you can’t really focus on what you need to look at. And, if you hold down the ~, then you can’t actually do the manual adjustment.

Since there is no automated way to reset systems after manual adjustment, it would be really great if it could be made easier to do these adjustments by hand.

jw

There is a way of holding the ~ down and releasing it that makes the preview stay. I am on a Swedish keyboard so I can’t tell you the details, but I use it a lot. You won’t see any of the handles either though.

Optimising staves (Finale ™️), isn’t that what Dorico does in Hide empty staves section of Layout options?

I’m not sure what you mean by this, but you can certainly reset staves and systems after manually adjusting them: either select any red handle and hit Delete, or use one of the options in Engrave > Staff Spacing.

You mean like the Finale feature of that name? Wasn’t that just something you had to click on to hide empty Staves? And it was removed in 2011 when they revised the Staff workflow.

What would you want such a feature to do in Dorico, that Dorico can’t do now?

I was confused about that too. Maybe he means the old Optimize Staff Systems / Keep all Staves, or whatever it used to be called, that you used to have to run first in order to make the staff positions independently adjustable on each individual page? Everything in Dorico is already independently adjustable with the Staff Spacing tool though. Or maybe it has nothing to do with Finale at all, and he’s just asking for a subroutine to recalculate the vertical spacing after any manual positioning adjustments are done to text, dynamics, slurs, condensing labels, etc.?

Thanks LAE,

I would be very interested to know how to toggle on/off the hiding the preview without having to hold down the ~ key. It doesn’t quite solve the question of manually adjusting the up down sliders, but it’s a step. Thanks very much.

Do any English keyboard users know what the key combination is?