Hello,
I watched the Dorico 3.5 announcement just now.
Many good news (-:
Today I was going to send a final edition to my publisher.
Should I install 3.5 first to get the benefit of the more beautiful slurs and beams, or would it be better to leave everything as it is for now?
The various changes to settings for slurs and beams aren’t enabled for existing projects in order to avoid unexpectedly changing their appearance, so I would recommend you finish your project in Dorico 3.1.10 if you’re almost done with it. You can run Dorico 3.5 and Dorico 3.1.10 alongside each other on the same machine, though not simultaneously.
Thank you Daniel,
good news, I’ll follow that path.
Daniel, what would be the best way to change existing projects to use the new slur options/settings?
Go to engraving options > slurs > slurs over system breaks and check if the tickbox “interpolate vertical position…” is set. As I understand it, it is set for new projects, but unticked for old ones.
There’s more to it than that, klafkid. Various slur design defaults have changed too, and the new setting for cross-staffed slurs won’t be turned on in old projects by default.
I see, thanks for clarifying 
This is very good news. Is there a complete list of changed default engraving options for new projects to be able to update existing projects?
Not that I would ever suggest changing versions oin the middle of a project (especially one with a deadline), but would XML export and import into 3.5 change the slurring possibilities?
(Admittedly, such a move, if productive for slurs, might require reformatting of other aspects of the file.)
Just importing the flows from the old project might work better. (I haven’t tried it yet though).
The changes to the slur engraving options we made in Dorico 3.5 are as follows:
Offset shoulders by fraction of half length of short slur: 1/3 (was 3/10)
Offset shoulders by fraction of half length of long slur: 1/3 (was 2/10)
Curved slurs: Slur end thickness: 1/12 (was 1/8)
Curved slurs: Slur middle thickness: 1/5 (was 1/4)
Slurs starting and ending on notes with opposing stem directions: Position stem-side endpoint near notehead
Interpolate vertical position of slur either end of break: switch on
Determine curvature of cross-staff slurs using point at which notes cross to other staff: switch on
I think that’s everything!
Thank you for the list.
Daniel, thank you for the list. If I open a new project, I still get the old values you wrote here. The new options are ticked though. I did change some engraving options before - but not the ones you wrote here.
You have presumably at some point saved a default set of engraving options, so your own defaults don’t match the factory defaults.
So new options are added, but the existing default values won’t be changed, even if I haven’t touched them? I would prefer, if Dorico just would leave my changes untouched and otherwise would change default values to the new defaults. So it will probably be necessary, to revert all settings to factory settings and add my changes again? Presumably I started to change values in Dorico 1, so their might be quite a lot of values, which have changed since then?!
If you’ve saved any Engraving Options as Default at any point, then no, Dorico won’t touch them.
If you want to update the slur defaults to match the new “factory settings”, take just the values that Daniel documented above (in post #11) and manually add them as you see fit, then Save As Default.
My concern is a bit different: I am quite proud, that I could convince a lot of collegues and church musicians here in Germany to switch to Dorico. And I also did some tutorials for them and adviced them, to personalize Dorico to their needs. As far as I know, no one of them is following this Forum, so no one will notice, that there have been changes in the Default Engraving options, because they changed one or two options, e.g. typically not to allow hairpins to cross the barline. I don’t think, that this is ideal! As I said, I would prefer, if Dorico only would keep the changed values or at least have some kind of marking, that the used values are not the default values of Dorico 3.5.
I could change the values for slurs, but I still don’t know, if I missed other changes since Dorico 1.
Maybe the message about opening a score from a previous version could be extended to give the options of “attempt to preserve the earlier appearance of the project exactly” and “update the appearance to use the new default engraving options”.
(“Attempt” is a get-out for anything which is unavoidably going to be different)
Hey, just to shout I love those new refinements !!!
Hi Daniel,
after my problem with slurs (slur - missing control points [solved] - Dorico - Steinberg Forums), I really feel uncomfortable with my Dorico settings now. Not sure, what happened, but I feel, that it would be a good point, to revert everything to factory settings and start over from scratch. In the future I will stop saving changes as defaults. Instead I will save my changes only to template files. It’s not what I expected Dorico to work, but as it look, this is the only possibility to be sure, to always use the latest settings in Dorico.
What will the best way to get rid of all my personal settings: reseting everything to default or to trash a folder?