One of the things I love most about how Dorico is built, is that it does not let you make mistakes in things that are standards. For example - the beaming and ties are decided automatically based on the note position and length, the meter, and the preferences. That makes it easy to focus on the actual music and let Dorico take care of the “correctness” and “readability” of the score.
One thing that I feel like I have too much freedom with is lyrics. Specifically, writing lyrics for words with more than one syllable. Generally, there is just one correct answer how a word should be split to syllables (according to the language / grammatical rules), however, I can write whatever I want, and I have no checking for that:
or:
(I believe the first one is the grammatically correct one)
It would be nice if you could configure Dorico’s lyrics language, and have it use a dictionary to automatically correct these mistakes.
In a dictionary like the German “Duden” there are only the basic forms of the nouns and verbs and it will be incredibly hard to detect in which “configuration” the word is used and which word is referenced at all. There could be licensing issues with the dictionary provider and it would have to be downloaded or Dorico would need an internet connection for it to work (I dislike applications except for the browser that need internet connection to work ). And lastly it would be unfair because probably not every language could be implemented and then the users say “why is my language not implemented” yada yada yada…
If there were universal logical rules for syllable splitting in every language then it probably would be already implemented, but sadly you need dictionary to know if a syllable is the stem or a prefix or…
I wouldn’t personally object to Dorico using the internet if the request is fast, and the software still works without it. Also, I don’t think it should be such a problem for the dictionary to be local (software’s like Microsoft word has spell checking)
In English, the word record is hyphenated as re-cord when used as a verb and as rec-ord when used as a noun. You cannot rely on automatic hyphenation unless the types of words are identified.
That so wild! I didn’t know that. But it seems to check with Merriam-Webster so I guess that’s right.
I wonder if it’s still possible to have some sort of “spell check” on that? Modern text editors can point out grammatical errors based on context, so it should theoretically be possible to have such algorithm.
Well, I did describe a specific feature I wanted and explained why despite the difficulty that @johnkprice rightfully pointed out this should still be doable based on the fact that many softwares seems to have context-dependent grammar check.
Currently I use the juiciobrennan site and always proof the results thoroughly. There are so many exceptions to everything in English. Not to mention, when you’re copying hymn texts from 3 centuries, different practices for grammar and punctuation.
And quite an algorithm it would be! Given that one can paste hyphenated lyrics into Dorico copied from external text documents, have you tried using an AI site (large language models, after all) to take care of hyphenating? You could compare its results to those from the site Derrek and Mark mention above and see which you prefer in terms of accuracy.
Absolutely.
I would like the Dorico team not to waste time on automatic hyphenation. It’s a can of worms. How many languages are out there, sometimes with conflicting spelling and hyphenation rules within one language? Not to mention changes over time?
As a music application, Dorico can only do it wrong. If you, as a user, need to typeset and hyphenate text in some language — assuming you care about doing it right — then either learn the basics yourself, or consult someone (something?) who knows. It shouldn’t be Dorico’s responsibility. There are already quite a few conflicting music notations, and, ideally, Dorico wants to accommodate as many of them as possible.
Please, let it excel in music, not in linguistics.
And BTW, Sibelius gained auto-hyphenation for pasting back when this team was still working on it. It was a brave effort at an algorithm (and user-customizable!) but the results had many more flaws than today’s online solutions.
There are also dictionaries that show hyphenation points, like the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors, which are useful for reference.
Though there are sometimes differences between prevailing UK and US hyphenation: but it’s certainly true that while there may be more than one correct way; there are definitely some ways that are always wrong!
). And lastly it would be unfair because probably not every language could be implemented and then the users say “why is my language not implemented” yada yada yada…