Project info and token expansion

Hi there, a small wish list for development consideration regarding tokens and information:

We use a 4 line copyright notice, with the last two lines bolded. At the moment I use two tokens to achieve this: project copyright and flow copyright. It would be great if the text in the Info fields could be editable to achieve this so the single project copyright could be used. Other information, the only(?) other field which allows for carriage returns, I use for our “Property of” labels, which generally have a mix of italic and roman text, but in Dorico are limited to just one or the other (as far as I can tell). It would be nice if all fields accepted carriage returns as well, even if not absolutely necessary.

Also, it would be very nice to have other fields, specifically, “Score Header” and “Parts Header” as these headers rarely match the flow or project names exactly. At the moment I’m using project arranger for my score headers and project lyricist for my parts headers (so far no projects with a lyricist).

So, at least “font style” capability, more carriage returns, and a few new fields and tokens for headers would help me out a bit. No rush and certainly not a deal breaker.

thanks,
david

Welcome to the forum, David, it’s good to see you here. We would indeed like to make it possible to provide some rich text formatting in Project Info. There are a couple of ways we could tackle it – the simpler way from our point of view would be to allow you to do some simple formatting mark-up with Markdown, but the way that would perhaps be better from your point of view would be to allow you to use the full text editor that you can use in the score itself, though this would be a lot more work for us. We’ll no doubt get to one or other of these approaches (or possibly another we’ve not yet thought of) in future.

Here’s one enthusiastic vote for the Markdown approach! I think many users would be comfortable with such a friendly and standard syntax, and it would be really good to keep the simple Project Info dialog. (The instrument name editor is full featured but comparatively cumbersome, when most of the time rich formatting is not needed.)

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You can certainly use carriage returns in other Project Info fields.

For simplicity I often put lyrics and translations that use carriage returns in ‘Copyright’ and ‘Other information’. To show you that carriage returns work in other fields I’ve moved these with Ctrl-X and Ctrl-V up to ‘Publisher’ and ‘Editor’ and changed the Master Page appropriately. The carriage returns still work fine, as you can see below.

Chris

So you’re putting the carriage returns in the fields which allow that natively, and then copying and pasting into the fields where, if you hit the cursor moves to the next field. And that does work. Very cool, thanks.

david

Exactly. I suspect you could copy and paste from a basic text editor like Notepad (in Windows), but I’ve not tried it.

Chris

I tried that to get the bold lines, which didn’t work, but not just for carriage returns…

Yes, that works as well for the returns. Nice.

(The method of writing out text on multiple lines elsewhere, then copying into fields in Dorico also works for player and layout names; handy if you want a part’s layout name to show doubling information on a second line at the top left of the part’s first page.)

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