one thing that has been problematic in my imported scores from MuseScore is the removal of much of the annotations.
Things like solo / tutti instructions, pizz / arco, sul G etc.
Some other annotations were converted into lines.
It appears like the approach taken is Dorico attempts to recognise the meaning of the text, and convert it to a more specialized object type (which may be kinda cool) but if it can’t figure out what the text means, it removes it (not cool).
This requires manual checking of everything after an import to see if you need to re-add it, which is just an additional source for human error.
I think Dorico needs to keep all the annotations it doesn’t understand (like Sibelius does).
By the way, I know these posts are all just complaints, but the reason I’m even sticking this long with Dorico is because it is very exciting and shows an enormous amount of promise which I don’t see in Sibelius. I’ve been a software dev for over 20 yrs now, and it’s clear an enormous amount of effort has gone into Dorico, please don’t think we don’t appreciate this. In my experience, the difficult part of software development isn’t so much figuring out how to do things, as much as deciding what to do.
The real problem here, of course, is that the current version of MusicXML doesn’t have an especially semantic way of describing the text-like markings in a score, whereas Dorico relies on a completely semantic understanding in order to know what to do with each one. You are no doubt right that we should try to create more text items from things that we are unable to parse, but this is not trivial to do. We will hopefully be able to improve this in future.
Yeah I think it will be difficult to try to understand all text items in an XML file based on the string content.
I think the key is to not strip them, but just insert as default text. At least then you know what is there that may need to be changed after import, rather than having a manual diff problem.
It might be better to have a (new) “unrecognized imported text” style, that doesn’t look like the default - e.g. a different color, or a background color. (I’ve done something similar myself in earlier versions of Dorico, as a place-marker for “something should be here but Dorico hasn’t implemented it yet.”)
Otherwise, somebody might end up wondering why some imported text that looks like a playing technique, or whatever, doesn’t actually do anything.