"Intuitive"

Sure. My point, though, was about the language rather than the page layout or content structure, and how easy the manual is to comprehend. That part could be crowdsourced and the manual will only get better.
In fairness, I do feel there’s been quite a lot of (gradual) progress there. But in the early days I kept getting confused between “changing instruments” and “instrument changes”, just to give one example.

Additional resources beyond Dorico’s manual have been collated by John Barron here:

If anyone has anything they know of that’s not currently listed, but they think should be, please do get in touch with John (or anyone from the team) and share links etc.

Without wanting to hop in too much and spoil the party, just briefly in response to discussions around “Steinberg’s house manual style”: there is a certain structure that comes from the shared manner in which all authors write Steinberg products’ documentation that informs how the Dorico manual functions, and we do indeed aim for a certain level of consistency across the various manuals. However, by no means does that mean there’s no room for individual creativity, but also nor does it mean that I, as Dorico’s manual writer, feel in any way restricted by such in-house-standards.

Far from it: I enjoy it, and think on the whole it works rather well. Others are welcome to disagree, and often hearing their reasons why* can be very informative and lead to tangible improvements. I disagree that crowdsourcing the manual would be a vast improvement: it’s hard enough remaining consistent with myself!

(*Concrete examples, or direct links to specific pages, where someone feels an improvement could be made please me greatly; vague statements about general dissatisfaction unfortunately don’t help me in locating areas for improvement very well.)

@ebrooks on the example of instrument changes, you may notice that there is a pointer on the relevant page to direct people looking for the opposite. Unfortunately, sometimes similar words exist and there’s only so much that can reasonably be done.

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With all due respect, I think you are nitpicking terms here. It is hardly unreasonable that someone would want to “create” a new flow starting at a certain point. Are you technically splitting the flow there? Yes, of course. But ‘create’ is a pretty ubiquitous term, and one can be forgiven for using it.

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I think I see what the user is driving at though - if I had a flow for just piano, in the middle of a score with other instruments in different flows, it would be very handy if you could, from the write screen, create a new flow using the template of the currently selected flow, but without the musical content…

Why would you expect to do this from the write screen? Now that is illogical! (All flow set up is done from erm? Setup!)

An extraordinarily specific requirement. Would that include metrical changes and key changes? But simple to achieve with duplicate, select all, delete…

Indeed, and this is the case for the Dorico application itself!
For example - there’s an option to Create Rehearsal Mark, among the many options to create various things in Write Mode.
Personally, I never used this term before and always added a rehearsal mark instead, which to me is the most intuitive, obvious and logical one to use. Now with software, I also use “insert rehearsal mark”.
But searching the manual for add/insert/create doesn’t get very good returns. It turns out that the manual uses something completely different - “input the rehearsal mark”. Of course, now that I’ve discovered this, I do see that insert and input are somewhat similar, but it would have never even occurred to me search for “input”.
@Lillie_Harris for your consideration.

You appear oblivious to the reality that the manual should work reasonably effectively for people whose first language is not English. Some empathy please? Which might also prompt you to search for synonyms yourself.

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"We see things not as they are, but as we are.”
–Immanuel Kant

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Well there are these languages as well, which I think is pretty impressive:

“Insert” and “input” have different connotations, and we decided not to use them interchangeably a long time ago for this reason. For example, “Insert mode”.

When it comes to synonyms, there is quite literally only so much I can do, and only so much it is reasonable to do with an eye on being as clear, consistent, and succinct as possible. I touched briefly on this, and the implications on translation, when I did a podcast on Scoring Notes. Hopefully in most cases, you’ll find that at the very least an attempt has been made to cover various situations (see images below).

A certain amount of getting familiar with the manual, its structure, and its terminology will likewise help you get the most out of it – from the index:

dorico_manual_index_creating

dorico_manual_index_adding

dorico_manual_index_inserting

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Well, strangely enough these synonyms seem to work perfectly fine in other occasions where there’s some inconsistency and the manual uses a different term than the application itself (move caret vs advance caret; create vs input key signature, etc).
A somewhat related issue happened to me with “note length conditions” when I was putting together a bunch of expression maps and needed to refer to that chart. Even though the manual is online and searchable, I ended up printing the chart out because searching for it does not return very clear results - or else you really do need to memorize where to look, which link to click and then where to scroll to on the screen to find it.

I completely agree with getting familiar bit and would add “First Steps” and “Dorico Concepts” as required reading. But it makes no sense, and it shouldn’t be necessary to have to learn additional terminology to find stuff in the manual. Plus, while setting everything aside to study it is useful and helpful it is not the only use case for it.
Often people would use search when and because they get stuck in the middle of something, perhaps while “in the flow” creatively, and need the answer right away. Not finding it quickly and reliably in a use case like this might be what’s contributing to frustration in so many threads.
Anyhow, as I said I made my peace with the manual, and I’ll move on now. But the amount of condescension and outright hostility on the forum every time something like this is brought up is really quite striking.
If the guiding principle is “figure out your own synonyms, you lazy schmuck” that’s fine, but then maybe let’s not put user-centric words at the top of the page lest people come expecting it.
image

Usually I use Google rather than the manual as it tends to produce better results from within the manual. I suppose it’s because Google have spent $gazillions on their search technology, whereas Steinberg have a limited budget and team, of which Lilly is an outstanding member who has done a first rate job with the documentation.

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Remembering that it often lists the version 1’s manual first (because it’s had the most cumulative hits).

Very true, but it’s usually a simple job to jump to the latest version then.

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14 posts were split to a new topic: How to download and use the PDF version of the Operation Manual

As much as I appreciate the idea of small pages with precise information on a very specific topic, it leads me personally often a little annoyed.
I feel like I am quite confident with the program, but sometimes need to look things up which I don’t use often or which are new features.
Often, I use google and then land on a page, that first explains what I want to do, but not how to do it.
This separation is for me personally a little annoying (but not more than that), and I would rather have all the information about a Feature on one single page.

Example: Insert mode.

I want all these topics (including the introduction) on one page.
From other manuals (both soft- and hardware), I am not used to this way: first only learn what the scopes are, but then click again to learn how to set them.
It would also feel more natural to me to learn how to set and unset the stop line in one go.

I know you have your well thought through reasons ok why to organize the manual that way. This is just a small feedback from a User :slight_smile:

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I would see it as defending and protecting the Dorico manual team, which long term forum users know to be primarily Lillie. Writing (and keeping up to date) a manual basically alone is an enormous task, and many complaints about it are expressed (understandably) in a rather frustrated and rough way. Lillie is incredibly helpful on here and on Facebook, and I think fellow users want to support her in taking a little of the heat.

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Yes, I do appreciate how difficult this is (and said so upfront).
It’s also perhaps inevitable that the feedback is very one-sided: many users first try and fail to find the answers on their own and by the time they come here they are frustrated and often angry. Happy users are all alike, they seem to be silent in their content; every unhappy user is unhappy in their own way - and they all come here.
I’ve certainly had my share of posts written in frustration and many many more written and deleted, never to be posted. To balance this out, I try to help others when I know how. But I don’t think forum users who take it on themselves to bully others into silence are protecting anyone, they probably make it worse.
Well, in any case, I listened to the podcast Lillie mentioned today. It was wonderful and worth every minute, and I found myself nodding to the vast majority of what was said. The only two issues where I don’t agree still are the language and the synonyms/keywords. Steinberg seems to prioritize an incredibly archaic and rigid structure at the expense of user-friendliness. Not unlike the e-licenser. I would prefer the manual to focus on ease of use and comprehension. And second, I think the more synonyms are used as keywords the better - because a user who finds an answer in seconds won’t be here complaining. Translators are of course important, but translation as an issue shouldn’t impede user centricity.

There are settings for MIDI input within Note Input Options. But as with the rest of the Note Input area they’re about how notes, chords etc. are put onto the page. There’s no real MIDI configuration going on, no VST’s, no channel setup etc.

That side of things - configuring the sounds those notes make would (well, for me anyway) logically fall under Play…

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Tolstoy!

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