Often I need to add a text object such as “to verse” or “to refrain” and this should be aligned with the end of the staff. Is there an easy way to do this that I’m missing?
You can make text right-aligned, either by manually setting it for a text item or by creating a paragraph style for this purpose. Input the text at the end of the required bar.
I often find a little nudging in Engrave mode is needed as well. Quite easy to do: after editing the text and espacing the input, the text will be selected… switch to Engrave and nudge as needed.
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Perhaps the bar lines could be anchor points in a future version. That would make things easier. (Works in Amadeus, so I’m used to this…)
Yes, it would be nice if there was no more shifting and nudging in engrave mode and the text could simply be flush with the bar lines. Dorico will soon be the only notation programme (are there any others? 
) in which the exact alignment of (system-) texts has to be done manually in some cases. This reminds me of a very old wish of mine, namely that system texts could also be aligned to the page margins. Hope dies last …
The latter is a cool feature of Amadeus, you can assign a text to a page coordinate (absolute or relative to margins etc.) from anywhere in the music which make it easy to add footnotes etc. I think such things are easier on a “compiler based” system like Amadeus (and perhaps Lilypond?), but I hope it can be included in a future version. I’m not that impressed with current text coordinate system, but I understand why it is as it is. I also hope a measurement system like Sibelius could be added as an extra/option.
And… could we please have wider input fields for X, Y etc in the properties pane?
I’ve tried to stay away from Finale for the last couple weeks, my native notational language since 1990, as I fully immerse into the Dorico world, and try to avoid thoughts like “Why can’t this function be as simple as Finale?” and figure out why Dorico chose this way, but this seems so easy to have these options:
Dorico has done a good job with the footnotes, because I can of course define a text frame. There are all the tools I need for the layout. No, I’m really explicitly interested in positioning system text or normal text in the staves … But you are of course welcome to contribute further ideas.
While there’s no automatic functionality for page turns in Dorico, there’s often the need (at least in some genres) to be able to place “V.S.” or “Time” or “4 bars over” text at the end of a page. The ability to properly right-align to the end of a system (as we can already do for left-aligning at starts of systems), without breaking multibar rests, would be an immensely helpful stopgap.
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