When Dorico has to scroll and move a bar from the bottom-right of the window to the top-left - when the music no longer fits in the lowest system - it seems only the item that is selected comes into view rather than the whole staff.
When entering lyrics, this can be really annoying because as you are adding lyrics, the lyric comes into view but the top of the staff is cut off and you can’t see the notes that they are attached to. Or when adding melismas, you can’t see notes that you are advancing through.
For example, here is Fill View before the system becomes too crowded (there is currently no lyric on the final note):
Here is the result of adding a lyric to that final note:
Here is the result of me pressing Space a few times to melismarise(yes!) that same lyric to following notes - you can’t even see the notes let alone the extender line:
Fill View Example.dorico (2.4 MB)
Yes, I’m sure this is true, and I suspect it would also be possible to reproduce this kind of behaviour at the right kind of zoom level in other view types too. Dorico does indeed only try to bring the selected item itself into view, and it doesn’t “know” that item’s relationship to the staff.
Thanks for the reply, Daniel.
This seems to make sense.
Is the popover itself an “item”? If not, as per my third image, the lyric extender isn’t in view even though it is selected/active. Shouldn’t it be?
No, the popover is not an item: it’s an overlay superimposed over the score. However, when it comes to positioning the view, Dorico treats the popover in the same way, i.e. it knows the rectangle that describes the popover’s shape, and it tries to bring it into view.
I have always been a “galley view” sort of person, going way back on Finale, so I didn’t really expect to like fill view. But fill view grows on me more every time I use it. This scrolling behavior does feel really odd. Your explanation is sensible from a technical point of view, but when doing playback in fill mode, the selection is irrelevant to me, and actually might have been several systems earlier.
The behavior in playback (when there is nothing within view selected) seems to be that the next system will scroll up if none of the next system was on screen. But if the top staff or two from the upcoming system is already within view, then the rest of the system remains hidden, even when there would be plenty of screen space to show the entire system (or at least more of it.)
I think this will strike new users as being a bug, even if there is a good explanation for it. Obviously, it doesn’t prevent us from getting our work done, but it is a matter of polish.
