I’m loving Dorico 3.1, and generally I love its UI. But occasionally, I run into a situation where I feel like the UI is getting in my way because it’s unclear or awkward. Here are some ideas for quality-of-life improvements to elicit hidden information and to make certain features more convenient:
Clarity
Show rhythmic columns through all staves while holding Alt (for using Alt-click to copy/paste or Alt-arrows to move/lengthen by grid)
Highlight on mouseover what would be selected on click (especially when over a beam/stem/measure)
Indicate if a property in the Properties panel differs between layouts (or between score and at least one part)
Indicate if an accidental’s logical spelling is overridden in part
Indicate whether an element such as a dynamic only affects a single voice (like voice colors)
Indicate if instrument is modified from Dorico definition (i.e. via MusicXML import)
Indicate direction of off-screen linked elements in layout while linkable element is selected (perhaps also indicate total number of linked elements)
Ease of use
Add a toggle for showing empty staves (like the existing condensing/transposing/consolidating toggles)
Allow moving and copying/pasting breaks and condensing changes in Engrave mode
Add option to select only one item below mouse on click (or at least do not select dissimilar items)
Add an option to disallow horizontal linking of dynamics/slurs/etc.
Alt-click a property to propagate it across all layouts (perhaps even upon modification)
I second this ^^. Being able to select anything and option-click anywhere to paste it is a HUGE advantage of Dorico - but can be hard to implement, because you can’t see exactly where you are in the grid when you’re pasting, especially with odd selections that include, say, a sixteenth pickup. It would be so great to have a grid overlay of ghost lines in Mouse mode so you can see where you’re clicking - and have that grid change with the grid settings in Write. finale-crossgradefeature-request
I have gotten used to eyeballing it pretty well. And the great thing is that if I’m off by a bit it’s perfectly easy to just shift it over to the intended spot. If I clobbered any notes before or after, I Undo and try again.
BTW, the system track shows the grid when you hold down the Alt key, if that’s any help. But they do have some sort of grid on their Big List.
& @Janus Thank you guys. Yes, very cool! Nudge the pasted entries…! @Mark_Johnson I see that grid light up in the System track… all we’d need for a locator would be vertical mouse tracking line that reaches up there, right? Maybe that would be simplest and cheapest to implement… whadoIknow - glad there’s a “Big List” somewhere ! Thank you guys again
adding to what others have said, whenever possible I have also found it helpful when doing odd and precise selections down to a 16th to try to include a nearby larger rest (quarter or half) and set my grid to a larger value that corresponds with it. So this way I am copying from the larger note value rest and any quirky 16th note tuplets or something will come along and be placed precisely where they should.
ie instead of this selection set to a 16th grid:
if possible I might just include those nearby rests and set my grid to a quarter:
and then when I do the copy click function at a roughly quarter note placement in another measure it’s invariably very accurate.
hope that makes sense. of course not always possible based on the music but it really helps me in a lot of cases from having to nudge after etc.
Yep, that explains the variability I was getting in pasting behavior… set a wider grid, and make the selection include rest or whatever content from the previous big beat - good advice ! Thank you !
