New (3rd day) on the 30 day trial of Dorico. Very impressive. I’ve been a Finale user for a decade or two and it’s wonderful to see some fresh new thinking for engraving software. Here is my question:
I have a large work that was entered in Finale but which I imported into Dorico to finish and evaluate the software. There is a huge number of places where Dorico changed the original notation (things like changing dotted quarters to a quarter tied to an eighth note and vice versa actually). I was wondering if there was a quick way to ask Dorico to switch to an alternate notation. Just to be clear: I’m not complaining about the program behavior, I understand the thinking behind it, but it would be nice if there were an easy way around it. I’ve searched the forum and looked in the docs but I couldn’t find anything.
Welcome to the forum, Scott. Take a look at the Notation Options dialog, where all of Dorico’s default behaviours for rhythmic notation (note grouping, rest grouping and beam grouping) are found. However, if you’ve imported your project as MusicXML from Finale, then chances are by default Dorico is preserving as much of the notation that is specified in the MusicXML file as possible: take a look at the MusicXML Import page of Preferences, where you’ll see various checkboxes that affect how the MusicXML file will be treated. If it’s important to preserve the note values exactly as you wrote them in Finale, it’s important to set these options as appropriate before you import the MusicXML file.