First impression kinks and wants.

First, congratulations on the launch, Daniel and team! It’s been great to finally be able to test the next generation notation software that is Dorico.

That said, I did come across a few problems while fiddling around with the program for the first time today. Some of these might already be known issues intended to be addressed at a later date, so please forgive me if I seem a bit overeager or critical here.

Additionally, my first spin prompted a few feature requests that seem particularly logical and relatively minor within the current application environment. Again, these may be in the making for a future update, but I’ll mention them just in case.

Here goes:

1a. Using braces in place of sub-brackets in an orchestral score (Engraving Options/Brackets and Braces) does not seem to work.

1b. Also the same dialogue does not contain options for adjusting the distance between grand staff braces and systemic barlines.

1c. Being able to specify the staff distances for the optical adjustment of brace shape would be great, and chasing specific glyphs for each interval even better.

  1. There seems to be no way to add extra staves to a player (e.g. passages of piano music written on 3 staves rather than 2).

  2. As others have pointed out, selecting music and other items seems to be limited to the marquee tool and the music displayed on screen at any given time. Hopefully object selection will become more flexible in future versions.

  3. There seems to be no way to manually offset a single note from the rhythmic grid. Voice column index was the only relevant property I came across, but while very helpful in certain situations, it did not seem to provide any way to fine tune the position of notes.

  4. If I am correct in assuming that a ‘note spacing change’-tag is needed before and after any deviation from the default spacing, no matter how minor, this seems like a rather cumbersome method for fine tuning the spacing whenever needed.

  5. Many basic manipulations like flipping slurs and ties, adjusting hairpin angle and length, spacing and note position adjustments etc. may occur rather frequently, and therefore seems inaccessible when they have to be overridden and manipulated via the properties panel. I hope it will be possible to tweak more aspects of the score directly in the score (either by dragging or via keyboard commands) in the near future.

  6. The text font list does not seem to respond correctly to keyboard entries; i.e., you can’t simply type the name of a font family to select it.

  7. Not all text fonts on my machine displayes correctly inside Dorico. This may be an issue with the font file, even if the font displayed correctly in most other applications, but I’m not entirely sure.

Thanks for this list. Hopefully you will appreciate that with the enormous volume of posts on the forum here and the other demands on my time I can’t answer each of your points in detail, but we’re aware of all of the issues you mention, except for the one concerning text fonts not appearing in the menus, so I’d be interested to know which specific fonts don’t work in Dorico.

Re: note spacing changes, no, the note spacing change event is for changing the ongoing note spacing values (i.e. the values you can set on the Note Spacing page of Layout Options), not for making local adjustments to note spacing. You cannot currently make local adjustments to note spacing or to vertical spacing, but both of those are high priority items and we will be working on them as soon as possible.

Thank you, Daniel!

I can certainly appreciate that, and I’m very happy to hear that you’re already on top of these issues.

As for the font issue, the fonts in question are my own text fonts currently under development, and may therefore have issues which affect it’s compatibility with certain applications. They seem to work fine in Apple’s own text editor and word processor, as well as within FontExplorer, but I will have to look into it more thoroughly before taking up any more of your time.

Thanks again!

You can always send said fonts to me, and we can take a look. Dorico uses the Qt application framework, which means that there’s another layer of abstraction on top of the OS-provided APIs, but in general we have not found any problems of the nature you describe.

Thank you, Daniel.

I’ll take another look at the file myself, and if the problem persists, I’ll do that.

I should specify, though, that the problem isn’t that the file doesn’t show up in the font list, but rather that the characters don’t display (they’re substituted by framed ? placeholders).