When I select multiple bars using Ctrl+Click and paste them somewhere else, the content between the selected bars at the target area will be erased.
Please see this little screen capture:
If this is expected behaviour I don’t see why it should be this way instead of only overwriting those bars of the target area that I had selected in the first place.
It sure felt “bug-ish” enough for me to immediately undo my action and redo it slowly to make sure I had done what I wanted to do. (And eventually put it up here for debate. )
(The issue in fact occurs not only with whole bars but with whatever 2 or more elements I select. If there are other elements between them, the corresponding target area will be cleared.)
I think you are misunderstanding how Dorico will interpret your selection. You have selected three parts of a chain and dorico has filled the gaps with implicit rests to retain the correct temporal relations, which have been dutifully pasted when asked. Dorico does not think in bars! See what happens if you select just the first and last notes of your top line and then do the paste.
I don’t know what you exactly mean with “chain”.
I have selected three pieces of music and want to paste those three pieces somewhere else. From my point of view (as subjective as it may be, of course) Dorico is misunderstanding what I want it to do.
My use case is this: I changed some notes for my Tuba 1 player and wanted to get those changes (and only those) to the Tuba 2 player (and subsequentially to Bass Clarinet and Baritone Saxophone). This means that I would like Dorico to overwrite those areas that I have selected (chord mode will not do this, Daniel) and keep everything else as it is.
I can understand that this is not what Dorico’s internal model looks like, but from a user’s perspective this is what I would expect, as it is in many other pieces of software: When I select multiple areas in Photoshop and c&p them to some other place, no blank spaces will show up between them. The selected pieces will be inserted at the new place.
Try the same experiment in Word. Copy/paste two non-adjacent words… what happens? Further, consider the situation in Dorico where your selection includes more than one voice, and your target is in another voice… How should that be pasted? Your use case is actually more complex than you pretend.
In your example you select discontinuous bars in the first staff and paste that content into the second staff. What results is the unselected bars in the first staff (which in the copy function has left empty) are pasted into the equivalent bars in the second staff - rendering those bars empty. Seems perfectly consistent to me. If, instead of selecting en masse the discontinuous measures, you select each measure in turn and alt-click the selection into the second staff your results will be as desired without overwriting the bars in-between.
Probably the most similar way to what @Estigy wants to do is to erase the contents of all bars that should be overwritten before pasting in chord mode.
Folks… This is getting so frustrating.
As has been mentioned in other threads, people with (subjectively) valid use cases that currently are not being fulfilled by Dorico don’t need lengthy explanations of what is happening and why it is as it is. I already know that Dorico is doing what it’s doing, because I made a video of it and made sure my observations are correct and reproducible.
The question is this: Do we, the users, want and need it this way, or would we expect something different and therefore humbly ask the Dorico team to think about implementing another solution?
This is the question nobody has answered yet in this thread. So…
If you say “Yes, I really want it this way, because I often select multiple things in one part, paste them to other staves and start singing joyfully because the content in between them gets erased!” - please say so and tell me your use case for erasing the content in between, because I can’t currently think of one and will be happy to see your arguments for it. Please keep in mind that knowing your use case may not change my view on my use case as that is what I wanted to accomplish.
If on the other hand your position is “No, I, too, would not always need it the way it currently is and can see your use case of copying some selected items from one staff to the other without getting rid of whatever has been written there”, please also say so, because this would show the team that there are other people out there who could need what I need.
Hi, tomotomo2!
Thanks for your comment and your video. While you are perfectly correct that this will give us the result that I need, in fact it does not make things easier in sum.
When you click the bars to erase the content before pasting, you could already have selected the top bar and press the ALT key, thus pasting into this one bar. Your method will result in the same number of mouse clicks, they’re just in another order You have to click each source area and each target area once, and I currently have to click each of them once. (You save some ALT key presses, though )
Indeed, others have also complained recently about people on the forum’s propensity to explain current behavior rather than immediately jump up and down in agreement with a confused or frustrated user’s assessment of the situation.
Truthfully, these explanations are more-often-than-not helpful. It’s important to understand the why and how of any function. If one doesn’t properly understand a tool, one cannot use it to its fullest potential.
Often there is a completely different tactic that can be taken to solve the problem. Also, other people come to these threads later and glean valuable insight and appreciate the info, even if the OP deems it unnecessary.
The problem, as I see it, isn’t that people offer proper understanding of the tools—it’s often that the people who come to the forum for answers don’t like the answer they receive.
We are often told things “don’t work the way they are supposed to” when in fact they do indeed do just that. The truth is they don’t work how someone wants them to, but that doesn’t mean it’s somehow buggy or ill-conceived. This is where the explanations come into play. (And frequently Daniel acknowledges a limitation and offers additional insight into the why of the situation.)
In short: people offer these explanations to help users avoid frustration and work to their maximum potential.
Requesting an update to the behavior (or a new parallel function) is another matter entirely; it’s a right which every user has, but I believe the forum writ large also has the right to clear the air about how things work (and why) in the meantime. (Janus is not wrong that in terms of computer-think, this example is more complicated than it seems at first glance. This observation is crucial to avoiding frustration going forward.)
PS—have you tried the “duplicate to staff below” function to see if it garners a different result?
Sorry to pontificate. This is a general observation since it has been a theme lately, and isn’t meant as a targeted attack to the OP.
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