After noticing an issue that seems to surface again and again in groups and forums (and in my work, which requires working with MIDI and XML imports alongside material written directly in Dorico templates), would it be possible/feasible to update the View => Note And Rest Colors (perhaps add a selectable item there) menu to include Explicit Clefs?
At the moment, explicit clefs, either created by the user or imported via MusicXML prevent in several situations Dorico from working (e.g. Clef And Transposition Overrides -dialog, or “Delete Empty Players” — if the player is otherwise “empty”, but at the start of the staff there’s a clef change, the function will not delete it).
Of course it’s easy to “hunt” the explicit clefs at the start of the flow by clicking on them individually and when eventually a clef becomes selectable = it’s an explicit one, and can be e.g. deleted. But if an option that automatically colors the explicit clefs would be available, it would make the process much faster (for professionals who work with possibly 100+ staves, counting all MIDI/MusicXML sketch staves and their large orchestral template) and more straightforward to troubleshoot (for beginners who might not be even familiar with the “explicit clef” concept; it would be just easy to tell them to switch on the “color” option and just e.g. delete all the colored clefs).
This is true, but “Select All” can be a crippling operation in a full score. I frequently work with large symphonic movements or film cues that can easily be 80-120 measures or more, AND in addition to the orchestral template, at certain phase of the work there may be an equal amount (or even double/triple that, depending on composer’s DAW template) of imported sketch staves.
Even with a very powerful computer, doing “Select All” to such a large flow (and it doesn’t even need to be in the extremes mentioned above) can take several seconds. I avoid it at all costs (in fact I have programmed Keyboard Maestro to override the Cmd+A with Tab+A for Select All in Write mode, simply to avoid doing such a selection by accident/muscle memory; in text fields etc. Cmd+A works normally).
Simple colour toggle should not drain any resources and it could be kept engaged in the template if one wishes. Especially if the “explicit clef color” could be adjusted in the Preferences to something subtle like grey or dark blue etc. — easy enough to spot when you know what to look, but not distracting if you don’t need any other colors.
Maybe instead of Select All, just do a marquee selection of the first bar in the first system.
Better still, use the System Track to select the first bar of the first system.
Thinking of it, I would even expand on this feature request and make it so that Dorico would color all explicit things, including meters or barlines.
Often enough new users wonder why operations that work on a very general basis would not work sometimes in specific spots - like an explicit single barline prohibiting multimeasure rests or an explicit “4/4” meter when the piece is in 4/4 everywhere.
Activating colors for these things would really speed up helping them as well as them not get frustrated in the process.
