First Steps says that the four keys to the left of the RETURN key should match the four articulations in the Notes panel. The Staccato and the Accent keys match, but not the Tenuto and Marcato. articulations. The guide say that Tenuto should be ’ and the Marcato should be ;.
Instead, the Tenuto is # and the Marcato is '. The ; key brings up the tuplet popover.
Do I have a corrupted installation? I am a Finale user evaluating Dorico and am using the trial version.
Welcome to the forum @Jolora !
The English First Steps guide displays the key commands on an English keyboard, and yes some articulations have different key commands depending on whether you’re using a Mac or Windows machine. However, this should still be those 4 keys to the left of Return on both Mac and Windows.
The guide shouldn’t be telling you to press ; (semicolon) for articulations, and indeed doesn’t as far as I can see. Can you share a link or screenshot of what you’ve read, so I can investigate?
Please select Key Commands in the Help menu and scroll down to the Write section . In the Set Articulation… lines there are the actual keys for your keyboard.
@Lillie_Harris Lillie, you are referring to the UK-English keyboard. However on the US-English keyboard the key to the left of Return is the ' / " key. This might have caused the confusion.
Also you can simply hover the mouse over the articulation buttons in the panel to show tooltips that include their key commands in blue.
The shortcuts have been optimized for UK keyboard layouts, and those articulations are reached through 1-8 keys (with the shift key pressed). Marcato is shift-3 and tenuto is shift-4 (whatever that gives as a glyph). I know because the French keyboard layout is reversed in that regard. We need to press shift to get the numbers and it’s one of the first things I tell my fellow French doricians to change. It’s way faster to use non-shifted commands for rhythms and the shifted version for articulations (because you need to change rhythms way more than articulations).
In my keyboard layout, ; is nowhere near the numbers, I don’t know about you…
On U.K. keyboards those keys are all punctuation marks to the left of Return. No numbers at all.
OK, I gather from these replies that this is a UK bs US keyboard issue. FWIW, here is a shot of my keyboard, which is a US keyboard.
So can anyone save me some time and tell me where to configure Dorico’s keyboard layout setting?
And thank you all for the help.
You shouldn’t need to reconfigure anything: the explanation of “why” and “where” those keys were chosen for the UK keyboard can simply be ignored if that’s not true for your keyboard. The key commands given in the text are correct.
Running Dorico on my Windows 10 PC, with a US keyboard, I have the following key commands for articulations:
Accent [
Staccato ]
Marcato ’
Tenuto # (SHIFT-3)
Stressed {
Staccatissimo }
Unstressed @ (SHIFT-2)
Staccato Tenuto ~
Other than SHIFT-2 and SHIFT-3,the number keys are undefined…
I think my key commands are defined wrong, or, at least different from what others seem to have. Almost like a hybrid pf the UK and US definitions.
I do understand how to change these, but first I want to make sure there is not some configuration file I can download to fix this.
Yeah, that looks like a UK keyboard mapping to me. On my US keyboard I get:
\ for tenuto
" (Shift-quote) for unstressed
| (Shift-backslash) for staccato-tenuto
I don’t know how keyboard identification works in Windows, so I’m probably not adding anything to this discussion.
Ohhhh…when I started with Dorico a few weeks ago, on a US keyboard, I thought those articulation shortcuts were kind of odd, since they’re not all near each other. It looks like the UK keyboard has a double-height Enter key and different punctuation next to it, so that the shortcuts make sense.
On a US keyboard, things are different.
Precisely! So how does one change the keyboard map from UK to US?
Go to Preferences > Key Commands (Preferences is on the Dorico menu on Mac or the Edit menu on Windows), then search for articulations.
These are the ones you’re looking for:
Click the “Press shortcut” field in the top middle of the dialog, then type the shortcut you want to assign. Then click “Add Key Command”. When you’ve set them all, Apply and Close.
I don’t think Dorico provides a separate maps for different keyboards. But you can remap anything you want from Edit > Preferences > Key Commands.
Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s an unused block of 4 keys that works as well for articulations as the UK keyboard does.
C:\Program Files\Steinberg\Dorico5\shortcutmapper\content\keyboards
The directory above (on a Windows 10 PC) holds 16 .HTML files with names like “english-uk-dvorak_mac.html” and “english-us-dvorak_mac.html” so there must be a way to tell Dorico which of these to use for a given installation.
Maybe I was less than diligent during my installation process and somehow specified English-UK rather than English-US?
I’m pretty sure the directory you’ve found relates specifically to the web page you can access from Help > Key Commands.
This is a locally generated web page that displays Key Commands on a keyboard, like so:
Yeah, I guess you are probably right. Still, it seems to me like my Dorico install thinks it is using a UK keyboard, while I actually am using a US keyboard.
For better or worse, Key Commands are mapped to the character codes that each key on a keyboard sends, not the position of those keys on the physical keyboard.
Dorico only has one default set of key commands for English, and presumably because its development team is in the UK, certain default key commands make more sense on British keyboards than on US keyboards. Almost everything in Key Commands is customisable, so feel free to adjust and augment them to suit your needs.
