My trial for Dorico has run out, so I can’t check this first-hand, and I didn’t find much when searching on the phrase “house style” in the forum, but is there an ability to export the musical options and Engrave mode settings as a house style that can be shared with other users?
I always hated the big bucket approach that Sibelius took with this and my ideal would be a text format that can be imported and exported. Then we could include only the exact settings that are important, leaving Dorico to use its defaults or user settings for others, and could check this into version control to revert changes and see the history of various styles as they are added to.
@benwiggy made a good point in another post (Behind Bars - Elaine Gould - #3 by benwiggy - Dorico - Steinberg Forums) - that Dorico could ship with house styles for different periods, such as “Renaissance”, “Baroque”, “Classical”, “2nd Viennese”, “Avant garde”, etc., and I’d welcome this. If nothing else it would be very instructive to import a Renaissance style into your work and see the differences in notation that are activated.
If you click ‘Save as Default’ in the various options dialogs, then the default options are written out to your user application support folder. Those files are technically plain text, but they’re not human-readable, and nor are they intended to be; they are simply a convenient serialisation of the data that is quick and safe to read and write. Once those files exist, any new project you subsequently create will take its options from those files.
Dorico doesn’t yet have features to import and export this kind of data between projects, but of course it is planned.
Can’t the files just be manually copied in order to achieve the result intended by iainhallam?
If so, what is the location of the user application support folder (on windows)?
No, Leigh, I’m afraid there’s no way to import any data from Sibelius except for scores you have exported by way of MusicXML, and most house style-type information is either not exported in such files or is ignored by Dorico. However, you should find that with a bit of time spent in Dorico’s various options dialogs you can make the same kinds of adjustments you have made in Sibelius.