I have a feature request, or well, a feature improvement suggestion. I don’t know if this already has been discussed, but I have not found anything on the topic after a quick search.
I find it odd that the search fields in for example Layout, Notation and Engraving Options don’t seem to include all the info pertaining to that option. For example, when I open Layout Options and type “Hide empty staves”, it returns nothing. So I need to dig through the options to find that the function is buried inside of “Vertical Spacing”.
Same goes when opening Engraving Options, and I search for “Staccato”, it returns nothing. I need to dig through the menu to find “Articulations”.
You get the idea. I think I could be vastly faster at using the software, if I could find everything from the different search boxes, instead of remembering which category each item belongs to.
To be honest I also think the Jump Bar could include more search terms and options. I would love to be able to hit “J” and type “hide empty staves”, but this is unfortunately not how the Jump Bar seems to have been designed, which has resulted in me basically never using the function, as I basically never find what I am looking for when I type something in the Jump Bar.
I hope you may consider improving this in a future version of Dorico! All the best.
Hi Gunnar – Welcome to the forum! This actually can be done, by a secondary search: Once you find the right section of the dialog (in this case, Staff Visibility, which you can narrow down to by searching for “staff”), press ⌘F (^F on Windows). This brings up another search field in which you can type “hide”, and the dialog scrolls to and highlights the option!
Thanks for the tip, I wasn’t aware of that secondary search option. It does not really meet the requirements I mentioned though, as I would still need to first know in which category the option is, before I can search the contents of that category.
I’m aware that the search box is called “Search categories…”, but I believe that this search box could be considerably more useful if it simply was called “Search layout options” or something similar, and it would search for every piece of text within all categories.
I’m sure @Lillie_Harris will appreciate your thought on search (especially the specific examples you gave) since she is always looking for ways to make the manual more transparent.
Even if she cannot implement every suggestion, the more she has to sift through the better the manual search can become.
(Searching within dialogs in Dorico is beyond my powers, alas, but the nonetheless yes I am always interested in hearing about people’s experience using and searching the documentation.)
For what it’s worth, I agree with you that this would be very helpful. From time to time I search for things - mainly to try and save some scrolling - and I end up having to scroll anyway because the keyword doesn’t show a result. Luckily I know where to look most of the time.