Shortcuts and Scripting instruction

Dorico
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John Barron’s recent Discover Dorico, Shortcuts and Scripting, was, as always, excellent.

Just realised there is nothing in the Dorico manual about using the Script menu. The operation manual (PDF and Web Help) is already jam-packed, but might it be useful to include something about this menu too, please?

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We have chosen not to document anything about the scripting features as they currently exist in Dorico because we are not committed to maintaining them for the long term. Scripting is very important and is something that we want to work on in future, but the current Lua-based implementation will probably not be the long term solution that we eventually settle on.

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Thanks for the reply, Daniel. That’s reasonable.

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Thanks for this news on Lua, I didn’t know about that!

I’ve used the python library Music21 with MuseScore in a Jupyter notebook, where MuseScore appears inline as I evaluate the code. I can also use Music21 with Dorico, but it’s much more time-consuming. Every time I evaluate some code, it generates a new Dorico project, with a filename made of a random string of numbers and letters.

If the team comes up with a way to incorporate Music21 as some kind of scripting or inline option (I am out of my depth here) that could be really interesting.

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To @Stephen_Taylor re scripting w/ music21 before loading Dorico:

music21 + Dorico outside of Jupyter seems to work very well — do this for when you plan to publish your generated score or make tweaks later: you’ll get the algorithmic composition of music21 plus the gorgeous layouts of Dorico.

For inside Jupyter (IPython) notebooks, like when you’re still tweaking your algorithm, I highly recommend keeping a copy of MuseScore — it is really designed to be scripted so that musicxml goes in and PNG or PDF comes out without any UI popping up. (If you don’t need MusicXML 4.0 features, I recommend MuseScore 3 instead of 4 because its startup and shutdown time is so much better). I’ve long done this dual setup with Finale + MuseScore and am starting to move to Dorico + MuseScore for the same thing. - Myke (music21 creator)

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Thanks Myke - very interesting, and it’s great to see you on the Dorico forum! I’ve had the same experience with MuseScore 3 vs. 4 running in Jupyter notebooks.

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Thanks. I’ve almost managed to get Dorico scripting to do what I want—currently have one click to start exporting MusicXML. Audio, and Slices (not possible via macro but possible via deep web) two clicks to confirm and one click to remove the nested directories, rename files, compress MusicXML, upload to S3, and make a musical example from Dorico. But still about 2-minutes longer than I had hopped when I first saw the script Menu.

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