Lyric text alignment property

Dorico
1

I may have found a little bug:

  1. Activate the lyric text alignment property in Write Mode.
  2. Try to deactivate it in Engrave Mode. — It switches off and immediately on again.
    The other way around:
  3. Activate the lyric text alignment property in Engrave Mode.
  4. Switch to Write Mode. — The property seems deactivated although the position in the score is correct.
  5. Switch it on and change the setting. — Nothing happens.
  6. Switch back to Engrave Mode and try to deactivate it. — It switches off and immediately on again and then shows the setting you just chose in Write Mode.

Does anybody else see this behaviour?

2

Yes, I see the same behaviour. It’s not a bug as such, but it’s obviously slightly confusing behaviour. I don’t want to get too technical, but properties set in Write mode can either apply everywhere, or can apply only to the current layout; properties set in Engrave mode can either apply everywhere, only to the current layout, or to the current layout and frame chain. There’s nothing to stop the same property being set on an item with multiple contexts, and that’s what’s happening here: you set the lyric text alignment property in Write mode and it’s set for the current layout, but when you switch to Engrave mode it’s looking for a property with the layout-plus-frame chain context, and it doesn’t find one, so the property shows as being off. In your second case, the property is set in both contexts, and when you unset it in Engrave mode it then falls back to the context that was set in Write mode.

I’m not sure that there is anything we can do about this in the short term that doesn’t compromise the flexibility of being able to set properties independently in different contexts, but we overall definitely need to come up with a better way to communicate what’s really going on here to the user.

3

Thanks for your thorough reply, Daniel. This is interesting…!
It’s confusing, yes, but other than that, not a big deal. In the score the changes work as expected.

4

I was stumbling about this today as well and would prefer if this would be a bit more self-explanatory.

5

The problem is, that it looks like the same property and so far I didn’t care about the question, if I change the property in Write Mode or Engrave Mode.