Issues that appear as threads in the Forum sometimes have a long chronology, and may or may not have been solved. It takes time and mental energy to understand the problems and solutions described in such threads, and I’m wondering if Dorico’s documentation has – or could have – a method that addresses this.
I’m imagining an administration summary, posted at the top of the thread’s page, that succinctly states the Problem/Issue, (brief) History, and Current Status (eg, a new feature in Dorico, or the most efficient workaround found).
Links to these summaries could also be added to the newest Dorico Help.
Does anything like this exist? Any plans to implement it, if it doesn’t?
Yes, I agree – it would be a lot of work to do that.
On the other hand, that work ends up being done on multiple individual levels – by every user who, in order to learn about the issue and try to determine how most folks are dealing with it – spends just as much time and energy in the process.
Sorry to offer this, but spending time and energy in the process is perhaps the best way to learn.
Often I find that trying to untangle someone else’s difficulty, and seeing how others approach it, causes me to rethink my own understanding the problem, and I end up learning something.
On the contrary, Janus: thank-you for trying to assist – I appreciate it.
I did learn a lot through studying that old thread. What was very frustrating, however, was that it was necessary to not only study, but also digest the entire subject before I was able to identify those responses that offered concrete solutions (most often, in that thread, supplied by Daniel Spreadbury and pianoleo), and then try to compile them into the very specific do’s and don’t’s necessary to go about my own page size procedures.
Had there been some kind of preamble about “the main issues, and how to deal with them”, anyone would have had access to the most important information, and would still have had the opportunity to study the issue more thoroughly through the thread itself.
Sorry to be a pedant, but that would require ‘someone’ to adjudicate what those “main issues…” are.
For example, I notice that users with a background in traditional notation (Sib/Finale/MuseScore users) have very different problems from those who are arriving at Dorico from a DAW. To which group would you direct your “preamble”?
Both, since the idea is to encourage people to use Dorico, and potential users come from both camps.
The success of any software depends not only on its design but also on its ability to convince users that their learning curve time is worth the effort.
I would suggest that in future if you encounter a very long thread, particularly one that has not been updated in some time (say, six months or longer), rather than trying to plough your way through it, just ask the question to which you want to know the answer. There’s no expectation on our part that you should have to read thousands of words on a forum in order to learn an answer. Just ask the question. We are grateful when users take the time to search the forum before they post, but it’s certainly not expected that they should exhaustively read every single thread they encounter along the way.
Provided you’ve done a quick search in the manual and a quick search on the forum, if you still haven’t quickly found a satisfactory answer, feel free to ask the question again.
We should also keep in mind that many things changed between D1 and D3.5, so reading old threads aren’t always useful anyway. There is a lot of early advice about ways to get around various limitations that existed at the time but that no longer exist in 3.5, or there are new/easier ways to deal with those issues.
Thanks, Romanos401 – I’ve noticed that. Sometimes - especially if I’m confused about an entry in the manual - I’ll search the forum, and, as happened, end up researching the past.
If you’re confused about something in the manual, a new forum thread where you say that and ideally link to the page in the manual that didn’t fully elucidate the issue would be helpful for me, too! Thanks.
