Text Syntax & the Techniques Popover

Dorico
#1

Hello all,

(1) Is there a way to type text directly into the Dorico popovers and have it “stick” if the exact syntax hasn’t been already defined in Dorico? - I’m running into the situation, most frequently with Techniques where Dorico repeatedly ignores my input.

For instance I enter “cuivré” with the proper diacritical, and it isn’t “recognized”! Or, I enter “flz.” or “con sord.” (with the appropriate period punctuation) and they aren’t recognized!

I’m afraid it currently feels like Dorico is penalizing me for knowing the correct abbreviations and spellings of music terminology. I do not wish to be trained by Dorico to learn new incorrect ways to enter musical terms I’ve been using correctly for years ;^)

I require the same size and location of text for all my techniques, (as I imagine most people do). I can’t efficiently use the default text font, since it is a different size and at a different position relative to the staff…

I’m not able to edit Techniques once entered (although certainly possible I’ve missed something here), so I can’t use the technique of entering a placeholder and then changing it for cases where I might have a longer instruction string.

(2) Along the same lines, a good number of the techniques are displayed as a symbol rather than text when using the popover, once I do get the exact syntax correct, for instance “harmon stem in” and “harmon stem out”. While the symbols are lovely, I would prefer to use standard text for these instructions (for commercial scores) and I don’t see a setting in Engraving Options to allow me to always show these instructions as text. Might I be allowed to override this behavior?

Thank you for any insights into working more effectively with Techniques popovers.

#2

Unfortunately at the moment, the playing techniques popover is very strict about what it will and will not parse. It will only accept a single string for each playing technique, as shown in the popovers PDF. We plan to make it fuzzier in future.

We also plan to add text versions specifically for the harmon mute techniques in the near future.

#3

The Dorico team has probably already thought of this - but perhaps you could take any text, even entered with shift-X; and then have an affordance (maybe a contextual menu) where the user could assign an arbitrary technique from a list (like the playing techniques list in the pdf). Then a user could type whatever they wanted and assign the proper technique, without the team having to try and think of every single possible text someone might type for a technique.

That would maintain the value of the semantic approach, but also provide more flexibility to the end user.

#4

Thank you, Daniel. That will be great. In addition to the diacritical example above, making terms input case and punctuation-insensitive will really help, for variations a user might type in as “con sord”, “Con sord.”, “Con sord” or “double tongue” and “double-tongue” are all recognized as valid. Likewise with spaces for conformity of such terms as “punta d’ arco” (eg. user enters an extra space before “arco” etc)

We also plan to add text versions specifically for the harmon mute techniques in the near future.

Excellent. I will look forward to that. I do note that quite a few other Techniques are currently being converted to symbols, such as “double-tongue” and “triple-tongue”, “half-closed hole” and “open-hole” etc.

My long-term request would be to have display control over all Techniques. I suppose the control could be global, but based on my job history, I could see being required to display some Techniques with symbols while others display as text (e.g. showing symbols for percussion beaters with text representing everything else for instance). For the work I do, I would likely display either one system or the other consistently, but I’ve been thrown a few curves on projects over the years! :^)

Thank you again, Daniel!