I do a fair bit of Plug-In developing for Sibelius, and was just wondering: have we heard any updates on Plug-In development for Dorico?
No, nothing so far.
Ahh well… As far as I know the only thing that is possible is essentially executable through "Record Macro"s: app:doCommand(). I would love to have somewhat more access, to at least something like Sibelius’ Manuscript.
Implementing Plug-Ins is an important step for the maturation of any notation software I think, as it allows for more specialized tools for all sorts of specialized cases.
One of the wonderful things about Dorico is that so many little things that are resolved through plug-ins in Sibelius are available automatically, built into the software. However I know there are many things that I (and perhaps just a small handful of others) will want that will be developed in the community alone. In other words it’ll be a great step for Dorico when this happens, and I’m sure it will be a big push for many others to get into Dorico.
I’m sure once Dorico gives systemic access to Lua hooks, plug-in development will be possible; but the word so far is that until the Team has determined what the final (or at least ongoing) status of those hooks are, they are withholding any interface implementation that might suddenly change in the future and orphan someone’s carefully crafted set of plug-ins.
All any of us have done to this point is used “Record macro” to hack the json file for various functions (I’m no coder).
Yes that’s true. No point in developing a set of Plug-Ins just to have them become incompatible with every update.
There’s no change to the status of the plugin interface at present. It is a high priority for us, but it’s also an enormous job. We do hope to have time to dedicate to this for a future version, but it’s not going to be in 3.0, I’m afraid.
Good to know. Thanks Paul.