Will 1.2 import fingering from xml files?

[rpearl]

@Daniel at Steinberg

Apologies for my incorrect Finale terminology. Me attempting to sound authoritative about Finale is a little like watching a cat walk on its hind legs: you’re surprised it can be done at all, but the result is wholly unconvincing. The general thrust of what I wrote, however, is absolutely correct.

Ah, Dr. Johnson. Well played Mr. Spreadbury, well played!

[ReRei]

@Robby Poole

Here’s a thought… why not create a “place holder” field (or some other name for it). When you import an XML file, what ever Dorico doesn’t understand is assigned to this “place holder”. Once imported, the user can right click the “place holder” and add the information to “fingerings” or “dynamics” or whatever, and Dorico then reassigns the confusing piece of Text/Marking/etc. to the correct place, and it semantically works under the premise of Dorico.

For things outside what Dorico currently understands, have it remain in the “place holder” field.

Just a thought… not trying to start a fight.

Robby

Very good idea indeed.

[Estigy]

@Romanos401

You’d end up with things all over the place.

Your are right. But the question to me is: Is it easier for the user to move the things that are out of place after the file has been imported to their correct position or is it easier to re-input all of them?

My preference would be to get things Dorico doesn’t understand into Dorico and then move them around - or delete them, if I want to.

You gave the example of text that is attached to the page. Of course, since Dorico does a better job in engraving my music, those items will most probably sit in a wrong spot at first. But I already know this will happen when I import MusicXML into Dorico. Music will be respaced, and text that was sitting in between 2 staves before will need to be moved to wherever it may belong then. But that’s ok for me.

Maybe we could get something in between: A simple option “Would you like to import unknown things as text or skip them?” on import might lead in the right direction. Later on the team might come up with more sophisticated solutions.

[StringLibrary]

Thank you for your helpful replies re: (string) fingering. I will petition Sibelius accordingly…

Daniel (and team), thank you for your work previously on Sibelius and now on Dorico!

[pianoleo]

A thought on some of the discussions further up the page, given somebody’s already bumped this thread today
:
A couple of years back, I was sent a Finale file of orchestral piece to make some corrections to (and make pretty parts from). Given I’m a Sibelius whizz but a Finale idiot, I exported XML and imported into Sibelius.

I don’t know quite how, but all of the score page numbers ended as system text, scattered in all manner of weird places; all of the bar numbers ended up as extraneous staff text, attached to various staves and sometimes duplicating the automatic bar numbers that Sibelius displayed at the start of each system; and the tempo instructions ended up as staff text attached to the Flute 1 stave but not showing in any of the parts.

Admittedly the original Finale file dated from something like 2006, and the (late) composer had come to Finale quite late in life and was probably using all sorts of text styles willy-nilly, not realising that they were all set up to do different things (think of all the Sibelius users that end up inserting dynamics without holding Alt/Cmd).

I can see the quandary that the Dorico development team find themselves in, and I certainly don’t want to relive this kind of conversion experience in the Dorico age.