Where are Script files stored on a Mac?

As a newbie climbing the learning curve of Dorico 3.5 Pro I am confronted with various mysteries. Today I am trying to understand how to use scripts. (In particular to implement mensural notation.). I have found the work of Alexander Plötz who produced a promising article for my area of interest…

In order to take advantage of this I need to understand how to use Lua scripts. (I have a software engineering background so this ought to be easy for me). Alexander offers this further article.

In that article Alexander says that the script files can be found (on a Mac) in the folder cript > End Recording Macro in the folder ~/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico/Script plug-ins but on my brand new installation of Dorico on my brand new MacBook Pro this folder does not exist.

I have done as Alexander suggests for a simple preliminary exercise: I put myself in write mode; started recording with Scrip/Start Record Macro’; entered a few notes into my score; ended the recording with ‘Script/End Record Macro’; and then tested it by running ‘Script/Run Last Script’. All went well.

I wanted to read the Lua code generated and expected (following Alexander’s article) to find it in a file named ‘usermarcro.lua’ (or something like it). But all did not go well: I cannot find such a file - anywhere. Now Alexander’s article is 4 years old so I guess things have changed. So I have two questions…

  1. Where should I look for the file?
  2. Are there more up-to-date and practically useful documents that I should refer to instead?
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It’s exactly the same path but with Dorico 3.5 rather than Dorico, assuming you’re up to date.

~/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 3.5/Script Plug-ins

To the best of my knowledge, scripting hasn’t really changed since Dorico v1. It’s part of the software that was started but left incomplete, and it remains incomplete and officially undocumented.

Thank you pianoleo.

Yes my set up is: Dorico 3.5 Pro (3.5-12-1066). Running on macOSBigSur (11.4).

My problem remains that I cannot locate the said file. I have searched for it in ~/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico/Script plug-ins and various other places besides. I cannot find a folder “Dorico/Script plug-ins” and a general search of the hard disk for ‘usermacro.lua’ and ‘*.lua’ and found nothing.

Either I am doing something wrong or the information I am using is in someway incomplete or in error. My expectation is that it is down to error on my part - the problem is what to do?

I’ve already told you that that folder path won’t be found, because it doesn’t contain 3.5.

  1. Open a Finder window.
  2. Click on the Go menu > Go to Folder… (or Cmd-Shift-G, at least on my machine).
  3. Paste in this path exactly: ~/Library/Application Support/Steinberg/Dorico 3.5/Script Plug-ins
  4. Hit Return or Enter.

What do you see?

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Used Finder and searched manually and here is the directory structure that resulted…

Given your software engineering background I was really trying not to patronise, but that’s not ~/Library/Application Support, that’s /Library/Application Support. The tilde is crucial - it tells macOS that you want to see the user-level folder rather than the system-level folder.

If I say paste exactly I mean paste exactly!

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Yes I have found it.

Thank you for your patience.

So the answers to my questions would be
(1) Follow the instructions properly
(2) There is no new material on the use of macro scripts in Dorico because the subject matter is temporarily set aside.