I yet have to understand the concept of default engraving options:
I recently finished some larger works for jazz ensemble. One was for a customer who needed a special paper format, and as the project involved creating many layouts I set that paper format as the default in the layout options.
The other project had to be done on A4 paper size. That project was created even before the other project but I took up on it after finishing the other. When I started creating the layouts for the parts they all defaulted to the custom paper format.
Obviously choosing one specific setting to be the default seems to be application-wide. Of course it’s no big deal to set it back to default to A4 in the actual project but I really would expect to have settings that rather apply project-wide, and do not bleed to other projects.
But that’s not all.
I used Petaluma as the main music font. Additionally, I replaced some music symbols with glyphs from another SMUFL Font, namely MuseJazz. Specifically I replaced the clefs and the sharp symbol.
Now I am doing another (third) project for solo piano where I do not want the handwritten look. So I went to Engrave/MusicFonts and chose Bravura, and also set “update text fonts” to true.
The result is the music being displayed using bravura but the sharp symbols still are from MuseJazz.
How does that make any sense?!?
I really like to do some customizing in my projects but I do not want to have to keep track of any change I made to the default settings. When I replace a music glyph in a project using font A I do that because the look of that specific font does not satisfy me. If I do a project using font B it is silly of Dorico to assume that I want the same symbol to be replaced in font B as well.
To be fair, this does not apply to the clefs, only to the accidentals. To replace them one can not go to the musical symbols entry in the engraving menu but has to edit the tonality system, but still…
And I haven’t tried yet if I now delete that changes to the accidentals in my piano project if that will then affect the look of my petaluma projects retrospectively, that would be a total mess!
TL,DR:
I think this is another example why it is overdue to have the possibility to save different presets like Sibeliuses House Styles, and I really want to rely on when I change something in one project my other projects keep ABSOLUTELY unaffected.