This is maybe beyond the scope of this forum, and of Dorico development, but it’s very much a query that’s come up in my use of Dorico Pro 2.
In Dorico 1 I had a variety of macros set up in Pulover’s Macro Maker (which is basically a nice GUI slapped on top of Autohotkey. One of them did the clever thing of adding a notename under a note, like this: (a specific niche demand from a small educational publisher).
The steps that the macro took were as follows:
Type Shift-X
Type notename (it actually waits for me to type the note name, as it’s not clever enough to figure it out for itself)
Hunt around for this image:
Click in the centre of that.
Type n (to use my specific Note Name text style, which is small and bold).
Type Return, then Escape, then find the newly-created text item (sometimes it gets this wrong).
Find and click this:
I seem to remember there being some difficulty getting the macro to find the various images, because when you roll over these sorts of things the background colour changes, but I definitely got around that somehow.
For some reason, in Dorico 2, I can’t make this work. I can externally screenshot this image but the macro software can’t see it because, I guess, it lives on top of the window rather than within it.
Is this something that’s changed in Dorico 2? If so, is there a way around it?
I guess long term the bigger question is, please can we have custom text styles where we can set the default position to Above or Below, shortcut-ed individually in such a way that we don’t have to start from Shift-X? Having to use a drop-down actually means having to use a mouse, and some of us find keyboards substantially quicker.
This is probably not the answer you’re looking for, but a number of us Mac people use Keyboard Maestro, which plays very well with Dorico 2. I have around 50 shortcuts programmed and they work consistently to save time. I highly recommend it.
It’s not the answer I’m looking for in that predominantly I’m in Windows for Dorico. My two-core Mac just couldn’t keep up, and when I looked at what a quad-core Macbook Pro was retailing for I decided to switch to Windows, at least until there’s more money in the kitty! Thanks though - I’m very familiar with Keyboard Maestro…
There’s no intrinsic difference in the way the popover for text editing appears in Dorico 2 versus Dorico 1: technically it’s exactly the same, it just uses a different colour scheme. So I’m afraid I’m at a loss to explain why this method doesn’t work any longer in Dorico 2.
Steve, thanks so much for your insightful response - do you think you could read before you post?
That’s exactly what I was trying to do. Unfortunately I can’t natively capture the text toolbar from Macro Creator; the inbuilt screenshot tool captures the stave behind the text toolbar.
I could screenshot the toolbar using a different screen-capture app, but Macro Creator then can’t find the text toolbar on screen.
You have to rewrite the script manually, not using that utility. I did read the text of your post, and I comprehended that you want to use Pulover’s app, which is not reliable- which you noted. Note also, that it has not been updated for almost 2 years.
I saw your reprimand, but I don’t agree with the force you used.
Here is an autohotkey image search routine, ready for testing, which I have manually configured and tested for you.
The image I used is attached, it should be placed in the Dorico Projects folder, though a different display size might require a different image file. I use Greenshot to capture the image.
CoordMode Pixel ; Interprets the coordinates below as relative to the screen rather than the active window.
ImageSearch, FoundX, FoundY, 0, 0, A_ScreenWidth, A_ScreenHeight, %userprofile%\Documents\Dorico Projects\defaulttext.png
if ErrorLevel = 2
MsgBox Could not conduct the search.
else if ErrorLevel = 1
MsgBox Icon could not be found on the screen.
else
MsgBox The icon was found at %FoundX%x%FoundY%.
return