Hi there,
while working on a bigger Layout with texts additional to music, I noted down three feature requests that I think should be basic, but I suppose are not as easy to implement as they seem. Anyways, I think the layout part of Dorico has great potential, which could be used much more with these additions, so I’ll recall them here (all of them seem to come up on a regular basis, but I did not want to necromance old threads) and if you see other important features in this part of Dorico missing, feel free to add them to the thread.
- Copy&Paste formatted text - this would speed up a lot of things inside Dorico and also open up the possibility to use a separate word processor for any longer and complex texts and just copy and paste the results. This already works great e.g. for building table of contents with a spreadsheet app, but every formatting will be lost when copying back to Dorico at the moment. Of course there should be a “paste as plain text” command as well, but it shouldn’t be the only possibility.
- global Copy&Pasting of Frames - also between layouts, pages and master pages (keeps coming up). There seems to be no obvious reason against this, and the current feature is very limited, hidden and forces to use overrides instead of Master Pages. Would also help as a workaround for 3. as long as this is not implemented.
- Create New Master Page from Override - this should also make things much more intuitive, as discussed e.g. here. It’s just the human way of thinking: You build something and then discover “oh, I could use that again, there, and there…” - that’s the point where we are used to appreciate the help of a computer. The current way requires you have to know everything before you do it, to do it the best way… might work sometimes, but not very often and definitively not on a larger scale. OK, Masterpages are double-sided but hey, just copy the single page to both sides and everything should be as expected.
I really like the possibility of working with frames and master pages in Dorico: It’s designed to minimize repetition and keep everything organized. These three features would help this concept a lot, I think, without blowing up the feature list and interface with everything somebody finds in any special text/data processing or DTP app!
