I also wonder why they are designed in this way.
There is something which is better to be controlled individually in each layout (I mean a score or its parts)
However, the followings should be uniformly notated in the score and its parts: the appearance of slurs, ties and dynamic styles.
The “propagate properties” function is merely a stop-gap and not the team’s eventual goal for managing properties across different layouts. I imagine the thought when they released it was that the eventual solution was far enough away that users needed at least some method to mass synchronize properties in the meantime. If memory serves, there was a good deal of complaining for a good while about having to manually duplicate all properties changes.
When the final feature does come, the team’s track record would indicate that it will do everything you need it to do and with a considerable degree of flexibility
I don’t necessarily agree with your final assessment. Of course we don’t necessarily need the appearance of those objects to be consistent, as there are massive changes in context – transposition and horizontal space are the main two – between layouts. A hairpin that takes up two bars will blow up if the full score fits two bars on that page. Editorial slurs may not be necessary in a part. You’re supposed to set the convention that best fits the music in Engraving Options. Then, you have to decide case by case whether that specific iteration of an object should be global at that point. Propagating now makes it absolutely painless to, well, propagate. But it should always be an editorial decision by that point.
Yes, absolutely. It was always our intention to provide as many degrees as freedom as possible when it comes to the appearance of items in the score and the parts. The aim is to provide sufficient freedom that you should never have to consider doing old-fashioned part extraction. The problem with the current approach is that the user cannot tell which properties are set independently between layouts (or indeed even between different frame chains in the same layout) and which apply to all layouts, and the user also cannot presently tell Dorico up-front that they want a particular property change to apply to all layouts. This is mostly a problem of user interface design rather than the underlying technical design, which accommodates all of these kinds of things, but we need to do a load of additional work on the Properties panel to provide additional control.
I thought the initial post had merit. For 99% of work I’ll always want slurs, ties and dynamics to match in score/part. It would be useful to set this somewhere and forget it.
When I write a hairpin to the score Dorico puts a hairpin to the part. But when I write ”cresc.” or ”dim.” to the score, Dorico puts a hairpin to the part, not the text ”cresc./dim.” Is there an option to have the score make the same changes to the parts automatically? It’s quite time consuming to have to change every hairpin to ”cresc./dim.” in every part, especially when there are quite many of them!
You can also change the global setting in Engraving Options–Dynamics–Gradual Dynamics–Appearance, and force the score to always display “cresc” and “dim.”
In general, if a property can be modified individually from the Properties Panel, it can be changed globally in Engraving Options.
If I put cresc. in the score a hairpin appears in the parts. If I then correct the hairpin to cresc. in the part this turns the cresc. in the score to a hairpin! This mess can (usually) eventually be sorted out in the Properties box but at the cost of much unnecessary work and cursing. There is an important principle here: the words cresc. and dim. are NOT synonymous with their hairpin equivalents - both will be needed at different places within the same score, so Global Preferences should not apply. It is annoying to put a hairpin and get a cresc. or dim. appear on the page, which then needs to be changed back to a hairpin (and then the parts need to be carefully double-checked to see what Dorico has chosen to print).
Surely whatever appears in the score should appears in the parts - with the ability, of course, to have its position tweaked if necessary?
John, select the cresc. in the score and go Edit > Propagate Properties. This will accurately copy the properties of the cresc. in one layout to all other layouts, without you fiddling with the properties panel at all.
Rather than doing this multiple times, you can get the score sorted and ignore the part. Then when the score’s ready, select all (in Write mode) and go Edit > Propagate Properties. Then Select All again, switch to Engrave mode, and (again) go Edit > Propagate Properties.
Propagate Properties was introduced as an interim measure, in Dorico 2.1. It will one day be superseded by something more intuitive for keeping overrides aligned across multiple layouts.
