FR: Improve Paste Special menu

[asherber]

The Paste Special menu includes the following items:

1. I think none of these really belong in this menu; they’re not Paste operations, because they don’t make use of a previous Copy operation
2. Swap should only be enabled when there is material selected in exactly two staves. (With only one staff selected, Swap has no effect. With more than 2 staves selected, it looks like Swap attempts to swap pairs of staves counting from the top of the selection, which is not an expected or documented outcome.)

Note that if material is selected on two staves in different rhythmic positions, Swap seems to act as if the selected ranges were rectangular, including rhythmic positions that were not selected; I don’t know whether this is intentional.

For example, here I have selected exactly two notes, in two different bars.

If I invoke Swap, I think it’s reasonable to expect that I would wind up with this:

However, what I get is this, in which Dorico has fully swapped bars 1 and 2 even though Flute bar 2 and Oboe bar 1 were not included in the selection.

[hrnbouma]

What would you then expect Swap to do in this case?

For me it makes perfect sense that the “tune” can’t change, only the instrumentation.

[asherber]

I don’t mind that result, but if that’s how Dorico is going to behave, it would be nice if it were clearly documented. And to be honest, there are also times when its behavior is (to me, at least) very unpredictable.

Gives:

Huh?

So maybe one way to handle this is to go narrower than my suggestion above, and only enable Swap when there is material selected in 2 staves at the same rhythmic position – that is, material which can be unambiguously swapped. But if more complicated swapping is allowed, it would be nice to have the behavior well defined.

[YourMusic.Pro]

If we could swap like this, I’d be delighted!

[PjotrB]

Swapping is always purely vertical, between voices or instruments. It doesn’t apply to random selections at different horizontal positions.

[YourMusic.Pro]

But wouldn’t it be fantastic if it did?

[Janus]

No. How would the swap work if your selections were of different size?

[PjotrB]

Terrible can of worms if you ask me.

[Zalde]

I agree that that could become very messy, but I also see @asherber’s point that it would be nice if the (im)possibilities of the Swap function were clearly documented in the help files. From reading this:

One would not expect this:

@asherber

..because the ‘strictly vertical’ part of the Swap function isn’t mentioned anywhere.

Also the fact that the notes in the above example are merged with the existing notes rather than overwriting them is not what I’d expect, since the Swap function is listed as a Paste command (and I assume a paste command will overwrite existing material unless it is explicitly mentioned it will not).

(As a side note, the Swap function is one of the things I instantly loved when first learning Dorico).