Amazing! And many thanks!
The thing is, I would not expect having to go to such lengths to do a simple thing like that for a $550 program.
In Finale e.g. we can create staff styles which can be applied to any measure or number of measures instantly, including any number of staff lines.
It is these kind of things that made Finale guys stick to the program for so long.
Let’s hope the Dorico community will soon be filled with professional engravers who need this kind of sofisticated control over music notation projects!
Finale = version 27
Dorico = version 5
I am sure the Dorico team hears all requests and then, in due time, will implement many new wonderful functionalities (that will be added to the exceptional ones that already exist), as they have been done since Dorico was introduced.
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You don’t have to abandon Finale. It did not have many additional features over the last few years anyway. Why not stay with it as others are intending to?
(I’ve installed it into an older MacBook which is unable to receive OS updates anymore, so it should work for many years I am hoping.)
Then in the future, another software program equivalent in all the ways you need it to be for what you are doing, may truly appear. (It may not be Dorico or any other we know of yet.)
Presumably Finale updates added in many long requested features, as Dorico and all others do.
Do you have the free trial or did you pay $550? (otherwise purchase a crossgrade once it has all the features you require.)
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True, but I’m not sure that 27 indicates the version number for Finale.
In fact, the software has gone through a phase in which its year of release was indicated (97, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2008, 2012, etc) and since its creation in 1988 it’s not easy to trace its development with any accuracy, especially as it was initially managed by Coda Technology and not Make Music.
Approximately, I’d say that there have been 19 versions of Finale since its arrival on the market, some of which are only minor versions correcting a few bugs.
Assuming equivalent ongoing levels of development over each program’s first eight years, the most accurate comparison would be: what was Finale capable of — and not — in 1996? (Though I ultimately think such comparisons are inherently flawed.)
May be : cause some nightmarish nights for users. I was one of them (for the 1997 version).
Finale didn’t really come of age until the 2000 version, which was quite extraordinary.
However, I think the growth argument is a false one. When you design software nowadays, you would be able to offer immediately what the competition has been offering for a long time. We don’t carve programming lines in stone like the Neanderthals, and starting to build software in 2020 can’t be compared with one born in 1988.
In 1996 there was no automatic alignment of slurs (yet), horrible
That’s a fair assessment. I am hopeful they will move fast, knowing that the competition isn’t sleeping. I like many things about it better than in Finale already.
I have the pro version of Dorico 5.
I am not writing in this forum to complain. And i shouldn’t have been condescending in my remarks towards Dorico. I apologize for that. I am just looking for answers and in the process want to motivate the Dorico team to implement staff.
I agree with your suggestion. I am a professional engraver and will continue using Finale of course. But it is important to get used to Dorico as well, because many of my clients use it now. It is a fine program and in many ways better than Finale. I agree that it is still a very new program and I am sure that in a few years it will have all the additional features professional engravers need to have.
CHEERS!
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Please stop digging (and perhaps exercise your professional proofreading skills?).
I, for one, have confidence the Dorico team has always been highly motivated
Then you’ll find you’re in excellent company here, @Thomas_Gunther — many, many professional copyists and engravers (along with composers, arrangers, educators, and theorists) are here as fellow members.
You’ll also discover how incredibly “present” the Dorico team is here in the forum, and how highly “motivated” they already are (and have been) in listening to us and improving this software.
Enjoy your “Dorico journey!”
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@Thomas_Gunther I am awaiting lute support, I suspect you will get your wishes before I will 
Thank you for your reply Much appreciated.
Some of us are finding answering at this forum on the way towards arduous, obviously it is voluntary as we are simply users who have found Dorico useful for our needs, but not the ultimate by any means. We treasure much of it because of the thinking (sometimes deep thinking, way past where we are individually) and the way it has been constructed, but it cannot (may not) suit everyone because as you know, music spans Centuries, adapts and changes with the times, composers, music thinking… and a small team aims high to cater for it (… all).
So we hang out here and try to help others, because from the start we were helped in turn by others before us, some being the development team themselves. We owe them a bunch of complementary debts in return for their dedication, if you notice, many of the replies come from the team on their weekend and late at night.
Many of us have come from other software (some Encore users are patiently waiting for their v6 because nothing else will do, fair enough), and we have gone through the process of trying to unlearn whatever we were using, then learn anew with Dorico, often (not always) finding surprises if we have to venture into an area of engraving we have not had to before, and find various options and features just sitting there to learn and use straight away.
(Finale developers were well aware of needing to add more features as you know, even though it was the best and probably most comprehensive out there for many … but they realized that to create those changes (you know, the ones Dorico people would want in there to entice them to crossgrade to Finale…!) would require so much detailed work on the code … that we have ended up with this situation. In their experience and wisdom, they simply could not do it in within the bounds of a commercial (popular, dedicated user base) environment.
We are trying our best to be helpful, and it is so rewarding to be given a polite reply, thank you again
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Indeed such a comparison is completely flawed. The reason for it is because computers today are astronomically more powerful than in 1990. Dorico could have never be able to run on such an old machine. What the Finale programmers did back then was nothing short of a miracle considering the limitation of the operating system and hardware they had to deal with. Today, computers make trillions of calculation per second. Back then we are talking millions at best. And don’t get me started on the ram limitations. They had a few megabytes, Today we are talking gigabytes.
Wonderful. I am thrilled to hear it!
Go Dorico!
Janus, this is your responds to an apology?