Most important feature requests for Dorico 4

Dorico
16

E. Engrave mode

  1. A grid and basic locking direction (straight vertical or horizontal line) when moving stuff with the mouse;
  2. A way to move staves, barlines… with the mouse. My project needed very unusual and irregular spacing and moving stuff with alt-arrow and even in bigger increments was a real pain;

I too would love some type of built in ruler. Here are a few different implementations I could see being useful:

    1. No fuss, assignable rulers (both vertical and horizontal, of course) with handles that can be dragged around. Many of us use 3rd party apps to accomplish this currently, although it would be lovely to have this baked in.


    1. “Crosshair mode” (sub-mode within Engrave mode) that has a clickable button just like when you add frames or switch to note spacing. Here two cross hairs would emanate from your selected object in both planes which would allow you to move it around with the mouse or arrow keys whilst seeing how it lines up with everything else all along both planes. I would suggest that if this method was employed, then perhaps the preview mode where everything is hidden is automatically employed as well so all you have are the cross hairs emanating from the object as the singular overlay on the screen. If the particular object has more than one anchor point, we should be able to tab between them just like normal and have the crosshairs change as you tab.


    1. Same as above, although everything is hidden apart from the anchor points of each object, so it would appear with boxes similar to note spacing mode.


    1. No special sub mode in engrave, however whenever you move an item, crosshairs temporarily emanate from it to help you line things up. Then they would fade one or two seconds after you release the mouse or after your last alt+arrow keystroke.

Personally I would prefer a hybrid of 2 and 3, where you can hit a key command to show all anchor points or hide them and choose to just use the crosshairs on a visually pristine page à la preview mode, or option 4, which would then allow you to line things up seamlessly without needing to switch to another submode. I would also love it if any of these modes drew horizontal lines emanating from either side of lines of lyrics (at the baseline, and perhaps even at the top of the tallest character?) so you can see how a lyric might line up with another object all the way across a page.