Finding help with different terminology in help menu

Dorico
1

Difficulty finding topics in help menu pdf.
I have been frustrated by my inability to find help for seemingly simple issues due to differing terminology.
Today I have been trying to find the procedure to select the top voice in a 2 voice passage and I have not been able to find any relevant help.
I am used to Sibelius where I can search for voices and select from a variety of options such as top note bottom note voice 1,2,3,or4 etc.
I have found no comparable function in Dorico so I searched the help menu and I have had no luck locating the relevant function. I am sure it must exist but is under anither name. I have not been able to discover what that is. Can I get some help with where to look please?

2

Hi Steve, and welcome to the forum!

The Edit > Filter > Voices > submenu has 3 default items, and additional items for specific voices found in the selection.

But it looks like what you want is Edit > Filter > Notes in Chords.

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You can also select the first note in your upper or lower voice, and then use Edit > Select More (command-shift-A).

4

Thank you both for your guidance.

5

Welcome to the forum @Steve_Farrell – I see you wrote that you use the PDF version of the manual. For areas of Dorico where you’re not yet familiar with the “Dorico term”, you may get better results searching the online version of the manual, which benefits from additional embedded metadata in topics that can accommodate a wider variety of search terms and phrases. Over the years, I’ve added all kinds of terms based on how real users have posed their questions.

E.g. here’s the landing page for the Dorico Pro 4 manual, with the search bar at the top. Searching for “select top voice” brings up a number of relevant pages in the top few results, including Filters and Large selections.

1 Like
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I find it hard to find simple things as well after nearly a year using Dorico. And that goes for using the online help or PDF file. (The web based help tends to take forever to load. It took 45 seconds searching for ‘top voice’ and nothing came up on the first page that directly helps the original poster’s question. After a few minutes looking, I never found the answers already posted here. ) We really need a “how to” document not just program documentation (which itself is not bad, just hard to find things - too many ‘related’ links that rarely answer the ‘how to’ I’m trying to find).

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That sounds like an unusual load time: search results come up for me within a second or so, and my personal laptop is far from top-of-the-range (read: surprisingly ancient whilst still, technically, functioning). Perhaps there are other issues involved at your end?

The documentation is designed to be segmented into reference pages as well as “how to” sets of steps, that describe everything you need to do in order to achieve the action described in the title, like “inputting dynamics” or “moving notes/items to other staves”. So I’d be interested to hear what you’ve not been able to find answers to, and what you would think to search in order to find the instructions you’d expect to find.

It’s possible that I put in too many related links sometimes, but given the myriad reasons a user might have landed on any given page and a variety of reasonable places they could conceivably want to go to next, they easily add up. But here again, the phrasing in the title should give you an indication of what’s going to be on the page: active verbs indicate tasks (“moving” “inputting” “changing”), nouns indicate explanatory information (“Clefs” “Figured bass” “Condensing”), and more UI-type titles indicate reference material that will describe and explain options, buttons etc (“Properties panel” “Edit Playing Techniques dialog” “Notes toolbox”).

There are of course also third-party guides, with different writing and presentation styles, which will each bring an alternative perspective. Perhaps one of those might suit you better? Or simply the videos provided on the Dorico YouTube channel?