Will the initial release of Dorico come with any features helping with keeping track of the editorial process (meaning here the edits made by an engraver)?
The most obvious one would be an equivalent to Comments and Highlights in Sibelius. Personally, I often use colors to mark notational elements that, as an example, might need further edits at a later point or that have already been subjected to certain edits. This, however, is more or less a hack, misusing a feature, and I have often thought that it would be nice to have an independent plane on which elements could be kind of tagged, reviewed and filtered easily.
There is a lot to be said about this topic and I’ve talked with DS some years ago about the lack of such features in ‘other’ notation software. He informed me at that time that it could be something for future versions. I don’t think it will be in early versions but I think it would be excellent if, e.g. comments were ‘copied’ out to PDF as comments etc., having ‘status’ flags on ‘pending issues’, process tables etc. and to be able lock objects and use layers etc. etc. A big topic for sure, but most probably not in the first versions.
None of these kinds of tracking features will be included in the first version. Of course I think they are all good ideas and I’m sure they will ultimately find their way into the program as it matures, but there are definitely more basic things we will need to add first.
Comments feature is now on Dorico 3 and I’m using it a lot! Thank you very much!
However I’m working with people that don’t have all Dorico, and be able to export comments on PDF (using de PDF comment feature as well) would be the icing on the cake!!!
I know I can export them by HTML, but I’m actually working on a long piece that have almost 70 flows, and it’s not always very handy to reconnect comments on a specific sections (if flow titles could be exported with their numbers, it would help a little bit). Thanks!
For the flow numbers in the HTML export, I’ve managed it by specifying the numbers in the flow title (this is even better since I’ve some variants like 12a. & 12b.)
One thing more, when you have a lot of flows, it’s not easy to quickly know where there is comments.
In the comment panel, what about to list also flows that have comments and toggle them (to see comments inside) automatically when you select a flow? This view could be enabled by a switch button at the bottom of the panel, so we can keep the actual more “immersive/distractionless” view.
Along these lines, can we have an option to select all comments and delete them? Unless I’m missing something, at the moment I have to manually select each comment and delete it one at a time. Rather tedious if there are a lot of them.