Feature Requests: Frames Mode

Dorico
#1

Dear friends, a few requests for Frames editing, from a longtime Adobe InDesign/Illustrator user:

PAGE RULERS. I’d love to have an X/Y ruler available which could toggle measurement units (including spaces!).

GUIDES. Drag a guideline into your score, and then use it for the next idea on this list:

SNAPPING. One feature I love in CC and miss in Dorico is the ability to snap into alignment with ruler points, guides, margins, existing frames, etc. What a boon it would be to create, say, two frames of equal height while in the process of click-drag, knowing that they’ll match up with little effort on my part.

COPY/PASTE FRAMES: It bothers me that I can’t do this with frames themselves. How nice it would be, say, for a teacher creating a worksheet to create the frame at the needed size for one example, then copy/paste that frame as needed on the page.

EASIER FRAMES EXIT: Maybe this exists already, but an option to double-click or press ESC to toggle out of Frames mode instead of either going to Write or needing to click the toggle switch would be very useful to me.

Thanks as always, Dorico Masters.

#2

Another feature on this topic, thanks to a Facebook conversation: an adjustable grid would be very helpful.

#3

Good points, which I’m sure we’ll see one day.
I’ll add one:

  • The ability to enter text frames using Enter. The new key navigation works great, but it is still hard to enter frames when two frames overlap.
#4

In 1.1, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to toggle Frame Mode (and others for Staff and Note Spacing Modes), which will work even outside Engrave and take to directly into Frame Mode. So this request should already be granted.

I hope the rest of your requests will be reality some day. Very good ideas!

#5

Yes, very good ideas!

#6

Where is the vote button, because this needs votes!

#7

Voting yes, yes, yes!

Much of my work is to create “clips” of music that will then be inserted, by someone else, into an InDesign document. This means that I have to keep changing the page size and margins so that I eventually end up with a graphics file of the correct size (or at least aspect ratio).

Probably for another topic, which I will search for: It would be REALLY helpful if the graphics output could be automatically clipped to the exact size of the material. Sibelius export as graphic does this quite nicely.

Cheers!

Ed

P.S. Dorico engraving is the best; can’t wait for new features as they come.

#8

I like all the suggestions above. I’d also love if alt+clicking a frame would duplicate it and its contents (alt+click+drag to a new position). This would be useful when creating an index, for example, where you want all your text boxes to have the same features (size, text, font, etc.). I’d also love it if it was possible to drag text frames from one page to another in engrave mode. Occasionally you have to shift your layout and then suddenly you need to move a text box. Sadly, you cannot drag them across pages. I understand that this, in particular, would be very difficult to implement under the current architecture since alterations are linked to pages themselves, not the content of said pages. A great compromise would be if formatting would at least be kept when you copy/paste between text frames. It’s always sad to me when I copy text from one frame to another and it looses all rich-text formatting.

#9

You can copy and paste frames from one page to another. It’s just a case of selecting the frame, then right-clicking the page you want to paste to (in the Pages section in Engrave mode’s right panel) and clicking the appropriate menu item.

#10

pianoleo, I am not in front of my computer at the moment, but this would mean one could use one page as a clipboard. I could duplicate a frame on page 1 by pasting it to page 2 and then back to page 1?

#11

Yes.

#12

I learn new things every day! :slight_smile:

#13

super :+1:t2:

#14

I think you can even copy it to the page it’s already on, but it ends up superimposed on top of the original one, so you then have to use Alt+arrow to move the new one out of the way.

#15

yes Daniel, you are right. This is very useful, especially as it keeps the formatting.


superimposed text frame.png

#16

The “Copy Selected Frames to Selected Pages” is interesting, but I can’t find a way to:

  • copy a frame from one layout to another one
  • copy a frame from a page to a Master Page (for instance if I decide to change my custom title page into a Master “title page”)
    Thanks for letting me know if this is actually possible.
#17

I don’t believe either of these is possible currently. In particular, I’m sure the second one is not possible: there’s not a way to convert layout changes into a master page.

#18

I would love all of these feature requests. The ability to copy frames between layouts would be so very useful.