When I compose, I often want to leave notes(memo) on the score, to remind myself what kind of thoughts I have on various spots of the music. Because of the due dates for finishing pieces, I often end up not realizing everything I wanted (or came up) to do on a piece. These notes(memos) become very important when I rework on such piece after a while. When I was using sibelius, I used review>comments function to leave such notes. That satisfied my needs because those notes could be seen by only myself. I don’t want these notes to be printed or exported to PDF because the notes are not for performances, but for further composition.
In dorico, I know that comments function is not implemented yet, but I’m looking for good workarounds.
So far I’m using shift+X text with 0 opacity. When I turn opacity to 0 it becomes invisible on the score, but dorico puts a signpost. I can see the text by clicking the signpost, and these notes do not appear on the printed score. But while I’m composing I still need to click on the signpost to see what the note is about, and the signpost itself masks first few letters of the text.
I’d be very happy if someone knows a better way to leave composer’s notes!
Unfortunately I don’t think there are any better workarounds for the time being. We definitely intend to add features for commenting and reviewing in future, but there’s nothing more sophisticated than what you’ve found so far.
I suppose the only other possible approach I could think of would be to create a new layout that is a duplicate of your normal full score layout, and then use text frames input in Engrave mode in that duplicate layout: those text frames will only appear in that layout, so provided you print or export your original full score rather than the duplicate one, you should find that works acceptably well.
My “out of house” idea for this would be to print as pdf, then in your pdf browser you could add any type of markup, text boxes, personal notes, arrows, etc. It would mean being out of Dorcio for this type of journaling and reviewing, of course, but it might become a useful way to do this. And no worries about anyone else seeing your notes. If you are familiar with ForScore, this app provides very robust markup capability that includes music symbols of any color and size that could be layered on any pdf. It would allow you to view your notes separately on a tablet while working in Dorico and may be a powerful way of capturing notes & implementing ideas back into Dorico.
I do this in ForScore with an apple pen once a score is ready. It has the big advantage that you can zoom out to fit massive amounts of text in tiny spaces.
Whilst composing or orchestrating, I keep a mini note pro window in which I write notes identified by bar and stave. These then can be transferred to a pdf in ForScore.
I sometimes write shift-x notes into the score, but would duplicate and delete before delivery.
Thanks Daniel for the idea. I tried the text frames in Engrave mode on another layout. It works very well. The only problem is that if I edit the music, including adding or deleting bars, the text box gets dislocated. I’m looking forward to seeing dorico’s commenting function in the future.
And ForScore! I also use this app and loving it. I use forscore on 12.9inch ipad to perform(read) music. I’ll experiment keeping notes on PDf at forscore.
It was forscore app that influenced me to switch to dorico from sibelius. Because I really enjoyed the feeling that the app is evolving and getting new feature on every update. So I’m eager to witness dorico evolving as well. Although forscore stopped adding features, but only bug fixes last couple of months. I wonder if they stopped developing the app…