Can't type the pipe character in pop-overs

I get this issue on a Finnish Mac keyboard, but I think it would affect at least German Mac keyboards as well.

In order to use the barline pop-over to write things like || and :|, I need the pipe character. In Finnish Mac layout, the pipe character is typed as alt+7. However, it seems that it clashes with the keyboard shortcut “UI.SetFocus?Value=kLeftPane”, so when I press alt+7 the pipe character doesn’t appear. This seems to be some kind of Dorico’s internal shortcut, and I don’t see a way to change it myself. I can type the pipe character when editing, e.g., title texts, the issue is only pop-overs.

Related to this, I also cannot currently use the [ and ] keys for accidentals, because they are typed as alt+8 and alt+9 in Finnish layout. But this is less annoying, because I can change these keys myself.

Thanks for letting us know about this. While Finnish isn’t supported language, it’s important to us that you can use Dorico.

You should be able to reassign the key command for showing/hiding the left pane, or you can just remove it.

Thank you very much for the quick response! But, unfortunately, this doesn’t yet solve my issue.

There are two different keyboard shortcuts here. First, there’s Cmd+7 for showing and hiding the left panel. I can change or disable it in Preferences / Key Commands / Window / Show Left Panel, but that doesn’t change anything, because Cmd+7 is not the problem.

The problem is the undocumented (?) shortcut Alt+7, which, apparently, puts keyboard focus to the left pane. I cannot find it in the key command editor. I can see that somehow it does exist, because if I try to assign Alt+7 to some other command, it says that it’s already assigned to “UI.SetFocus?Value=kLeftPane”, but UI.SetFocus is not found in the preferences.

And while Finnish is (understandably) not a supported language, German is. Since German Macs also use Alt+7 for the pipe character, I believe they would suffer from this issue as well. Perhaps some German Mac user could try to reproduce this?

What about the letter I instead of | for barline in the next update?

For users with “Scandinavian” and some other keyboards, a workaround would be to keep a window open in a notepad program with the | character and maybe other ones, and copypaste into Dorico commands, or use a separate computer keyboard, or change keyboard system to “international” if that is possible with the physical keyboard layout.

Any better solutions?

Heh. Just found the menu with the barline commands…

You can also type words for the different barline types, e.g. “single”, “double”, “start” (for start repeat), “end” (for end repeat), “end-start” (for coincident end/start repeat barlines), “final” (for a final barline), “dash”, “tick”, and “short”.

Daniel, this is great info. I understand that the manual isn’t complete yet, and that you want to do every entry properly. But I believe the pop-up menus are an important part of Dorico’s workflow, and it’s really hard to take the full advantage of this by only guessing on words.

Could someone in the team in the near future please post some lists like this somewhere in the forum? Lists of very word recognized by the different pop-up menus, and also the “wildcards” from Engrave mode. It doesn’t need to be perfect, or complete. It would be of great help!

Yes, I will try to put such a list together in the next day or two. It won’t take too long, but I still have dozens of emails to answer, and probably at least 100 threads I haven’t yet managed to read here, so please give me a bit of time. Thanks!

Great! By the way, “final” isn’t working for me, although all of the others are. It’s not a big deal - it still works through the “Bars and Barlines” panel - but just to let you know.

Try “fin” instead of “final”.