Hi,
I’m a recent user to Dorico, and I want to say that I absolutely love this software. With many of the “little” things it can do in regards with post production, it’s clear the team has thought about what composers actually need: QoL features like Booklet printing, content/text frames, parent/template pages, all of which are features present in more robust tools like InDesign. With the (fantastic!!) addition of rulers and gridlines in Dorico 6, it’s clear this commitment remains. With that said, I find I personally still need to use InDesign, but I (and hopefully the team agrees) would love for Dorico to be a true, one stop shop for a start-to-finish self-published score. That’d be so beneficial to me and many others, I’d consider just donating my Adobe subscription to the Dorico team instead. Here would be a few of my wishes to Engrave/Print Modes. Some of them, I hope, may be reasonably straightforward to integrate:
- A basic vector shape tool in engrave mode. There are so many covers/front matter situations - especially choral scores - with simple rectangular backdrops behind the text, for example. Currently, you have to make a vector/raster of a rectangle, which, while admittedly is not very difficult, it’s tedious, it disrupts the flow, and importantly is quite finicky to get the sizing right using the current content frames, as the software tries to intelligently resize graphics. A simple rectangle vector tool with stroke, fill, opacity and rotation could be used across Dorico in countless ways.
- Currently there is no ability to copy/paste frames. It just feels like something you should be able to do.
- Please consider some sort of basic graphical alignment tool. Ideally, this would be integrated across the software, but at it’s simplest, “an align to horizontal center button” is something that I find myself constantly needing when resizing textboxes, frames, etc.
- Lastly, a harder thing, but I wonder if there’s any plans to integrate bleed/crop marks into Print mode. So many scores are printed on oversized paper and sliced down to fit part scores, octavo, etc. It would just be a really lovely extra feature.
The team obviously cares a lot about QoL, and it doesn’t go unnoticed - to me at least, Dorico feels miles better to use than all the other software solutions. I just feel that Dorico has the power to really corner the market on this, and I hope these suggestions are thoughtfully considered. I would love to stop paying for Creative Cloud 
