Using Dorico Elements 5.1.50 on a Mac laptop (Apple silicon).
I want to enter arbitrary textual instructions, especially at the beginning of a piece. For example, Beethoven’s piano sonata op.27 no.2 (Moonlight Sonata) movement 1 begins “Adagio Sostenuto” which appears at the left margin above the first staff. Underneath “Adagio Sostenuto” but still above the music Beethoven wrote “Si deve suonare tutto questo pezzo delicatissimamente e senza sordino.” Furthermore, between the treble staff and bass staff one sees “sempre pianissimo e senza sordino.” I cannot figure out a way to enter either of Beethoven’s pieces of text. At a simpler level, I see that one can select words from a menu and enter “legato,” but then if one wants to qualify this with “sempre” then it seems that only “legato sempre” can be entered, not (the correct) “sempre legato.” Such arbitrary string can also occur anywhere in the music (for example, “poco stretto” or “sempre pianissimo” or “ma sempre ben marcato il tema”). But to repeat, one wants not just “sempre legato” but also both of Beethoven’s more complex long arbitrary text strings, and in their correct positions. It seems like this is a bread-and-butter aspect of music notation. Help?
Dorico sometimes is a bit too eager (and sometimes fails) to interpret text entered in a popover. It tries to coerce text entries into a few (too few) special patterns that are actually not always applicable.
Don’t bother. Enter just the main term, like ‘legato’, and then add any prefixes etc. in the properties panel below. Dorico will leave them alone.
If I understand you correctly, you may want to take some time to explore Staff-attached Text (and it’s “close cousin” System-attached Text). Quickly mocking this up, I was able to add and choose point size and font style:
Welcome! The short answer is that there are different kinds of “text”, depending upon what you expect Dorico to do with that text later. It sounds like for now that you want “staff attached text” Click on the note or whatever where you want to anchor it and type SHIFT+X. As you’d expect, that kind of text is attached to that location in a staff (without colliding) and will adjust as necessary as you make updates to the score. There is also “system attached text” (SHIFT-OPT-X) and I’m sure you can guess what that does. These are both arbitrary text and can include uni-code characters if you need them.
You are only limited to specific text for those times when Dorico is expected to take a specific action. I’m sorry if I’m over-explaining, but in those cases they aren’t exactly TEXT (or only text) in the way that they might appear. In your example, if you pick “adagio” from the right side bar, it is actually a tempo instruction to Dorico and so it has some extra rules and features if you need to modify it so that it plays back correctly. You can modify it to appear however you want (usually) but it has to be done in a way that Dorico can understand the significance of what you asking it to do. The shortcut for Tempo incidentally is SHIFT-T.
You can go so far as to recreate an illustrated fronts piece with custom pages, graphics and text frames if you want. Just mentioning that so you don’t think it isn’t possible.
OK, I’ll bite. What am I looking for to create an illustrated frontispiece page in Dorico Elements – or equivalently (more importantly) a page of editor’s comments at the end of a piece? To date, I only see how to add a text page in the full version of Dorico. Feel free to just tell me a search string that will get me to the desired info in the help pages.
I’m afraid you will need Dorico Pro to create page templates that will look exactly as you want and will not create overrides… Feel free to correct me if I’m wrong!
Even as a Dorico Pro user I still regularly use Affinity Publisher for title pages, indexes and such, because Dorico just doesn’t have many of the typographic refinements that I need for that. Things like justification & hyphenation, OpenType features, custom tab stops, superfluous fancy things like drop caps or even simply reflowing text across columns or frames can’t be done in Dorico. Of course I would love to see some of that changed at some point but it’ll never be as powerful as a dedicated DTP application.
You can right-click in the Finder > Quick Actions > Create PDF to merge multiple PDF files to a new file. IIRC, they are joined in the sort order of the window.
