A few layout questions

  1. Is there a setting I can change so Dorico disallows long tempo text from running into part margins?

  2. I am hiding accidentals in my score but changes are not being reflected in the parts. In the example attached, I hid an accidental in the score and it remains visible in the part. I don’t want to have to make changes twice - once in the score and again in each part. How do I get parts to mirror changes in the score?


    margins.png

  1. No, there’s not, I’m afraid.

  2. We have been debating whether these properties should be independent between layouts, or not. My feeling is that it is helpful for them to be independent because note spelling is independent, and if you choose to spell a note differently in a part, that could have a knock-on effect on things like cautionary accidentals, and thus it’s necessary that you should be able to hide them independently.

In the forthcoming update we will have a new Window > Counterpart Layout command (with default shortcut W) that will allow you to quickly flip back and forth between the full score layout and the corresponding part layout, which will hopefully help to at least reduce the amount of time a round-trip to make this edit will take.

Daniel, can I throw in a request for the option of non-independent spelling, please? I can’t speak for the user-base as a whole, as each of our needs are different, but I can say that I haven’t engraved a single note in Dorico that required independent spelling.

Maybe a setting for non-transposing instruments to link score/part accidental spellings?

That’s precisely where I stumbled - engraving a multi-piano piece direct from the composer’s parts (not score). It seriously didn’t occur to me that if I typed straight into parts the spelling in the score would come awry.

I would suggest that the score act as the parent object and the parts as children. The children by default will inherent the changes made in the parent (this is the desired outcome most of the time). If changes are made in the child (part), these would override the inherited aspects taken from the parent. Conversely, some changes (likes pitches) are cascaded back from the part to the score. Note re-spellings, stems directions, etc. do not.

The current way this is working independently is doubling my efforts between part and score, offsetting other speed gains Dorico is giving me.

Another idea/approach (best of both worlds?) is to have a toggle button in the parts and score views. By default, the changes you make in one place will be made in another (mirroring toggle button on). if you want to prohibit that for the current task you are doing, press the toggle to temporarily disable (Mirroring toggle button off). This seems to provide both simplicity and control.

Daniel, you’re absolutely correct that “you should be able to hide them independently” — but it seems odd that we must hide them independently. Isn’t the question with all these properties, which is most likely to be helpful to the user most of the time? In this case, 99% of the time spellings/accidentals should match between the score and part. Yes, 1% of the time I really want to respell something in a transposing part, but that’s much more rare. So the idea that every time you manually hide/show an accidental in the score, you’d need to remember to change it in the part seems counterintuitive.

I agree that we do need to do something about this issue, and we will put our thinking caps on about the right way to try to solve it. It’s not something that we will be able to address in our forthcoming update, however.

Just throwing out an idea here:
How about an “unlink” button/property that allows independent properties on a single item? So that when an item is “linked” (which would be the default) - properties such as accidentals, noteheads, etc are consistent in every layout. When it’s “unlinked”, all changes apply to the current layout only.

We have certainly tossed around ideas like this, but we haven’t yet come to any firm conclusions about how to proceed.