bejmark

I’m getting in on this discussion rather late; but better than never, perhaps.
I, too, am a long-time Encore user, in my case since the mid-1990s. It is an avocation for me, as I am a neurologist most of the time, but also a computer geek (programmer) and choir member.
I would also be happy to beta test. What I can bring to the table is a large set of files with Cyrillic fonts (both modern Ukrainian and Old Slavonic). Nearly everything I have transcribed contains lyrics.

In case anyone is interested, the biggest pain points I’ve had with prior versions of Encore are the following:
— I was told by the Finale folks (I dabbled, but hated it) that there was a flaw in Encore 4 files that causes problems with Finale reading them, but which Encore 5 could handle. It’s very easy for long-time users to use existing files as a template for a new file of the same “type”, rather than starting from a new, pristine Encore 5 file. Whatever that but was, it would be excellent if it could be fixed for good in Encore 6.
— Encore will freeze hard when clicking and dragging an object and holding onto it for some time without letting it go. Of course, if one has not Ctrl+S’ed in a while, then one is up the measure without a stem.
— I have to keep all pallets open, save for guitar, because I need at least one item from each of them. But with several of the pallets, I use only one or two items. Being able to create my own custom pallet with my most-needed items would be great.
— Absence of dashed tie/slur lines (useful for hymns with multiple stanzas under one set of notes).
— Ties tying across systems work quite well, but slurs work very poorly across systems. Especially when you start using Ctrl+[ Ctrl+] to move measures around.
— For items anchored to measures, when those measures get moved to other systems via Ctrl+[ or Ctrl+] , or moved because measures were added, often get unmoored entirely, or apparently so. In some cases it is possible to discover they they actually exist past the margin, in fact past the visible page. Being past the page, they are utterly inaccessible for editing or deletion. The only solution is to use Ctrl+[ or Ctrl+] to being the measure back into the current system, move that item away to some geologically stable measure (e.g. a system above), then move the measures around again to where one desires them to be. This includes lyric syllables (which seem to be simply custom-purpose text boxes), including hyphens. This also leaves behind lyric “turds”, empty lyric boxes that obviously can’t be seen. One can TAB through the lyrics and discover that these empty boxes exist, but deleting them without deleting desired stuff can be very hard. Notably, these empty lyrics boxes have a “length”, as Encore will accommodate for the when Ctrl+J auto-spacing notes.
— Underlines placed in lyrics often will underline beyond (to the left of) the lyric syllable prior, to the next-prior syllable, often a hyphen. One has to move the syllables around a bit to get the underline to left-anchor to the correct syllable.
— There is no way to left-justify a lyric (e.g. when the first syllable of a piece has a stanza number also, and I’d like the multiple stanza numbers to align).
— Lots of things seem to be tied to a relative position within the measure. Putting on my programmer hat, it seems to me that, for example, the end of a slur is understood by Encore as starting e.g. 34% into the measure from the left bar line, *rather than* something like “anchored to this note, at a point 3% of the measure’s width to the right of that note”. So currently, if things shift around because of adding or removing measures, or using Ctrl+J, or other stuff, that end of that slur remains in the same relative horizontal position within the measure, true, but the note to which it refers has moved. Same sort of behavior with many other marks such as tempo or dynamic markings, but seemingly not with certain others like fermate, accents, etc which are much more firmly attached to their notes. Dynamic marks and related items should be anchored to the starting bar line, if placed prior to any note, or anchored to a note plus a relative distance (percentage of the distance) to the next note.
— After not touching a given Encore file for a good bit of time (months), Encore suddenly, randomly, does not recognize one of the fonts therein and requests a font to replace. This is quite random. I can find no pattern. Since the font non-recognition happens before anything is displayed, there is no way to know which font to suggest as a replacement. I end up picking some strange font I never use only so as to be able to recognize it easily.
— Adding color (by click-dragging an area) can behave strangely, occasionally adding color to the Text Elements (title, page number) etc., which is then very hard to remove.
— Italics are not handled well at the right margins of text boxes (try lowercase f – its upper right curl is often cut off).
— Text boxes don’t handle newlines very well. Automatic resizes (e.g. due to a Ctrl+J) often completely mess up the line breaks if they make the box narrower horizontally. Encore seems to handle text boxes containing paragraphs of descriptive text no differently then a text box containing the word Andante, i.e., as something that is of necessity tied to a measure of music and also of necessity must be sized with that measure. There is no such thing as an independent text box anchored a location on the page rather than to a measure.
— If a text box is assigned color, any later editing (just clicking T then clicking into it) reverts that box back to black, and color has to be reselected manually.
— There is no way to control the measure to which a text box is anchored. I may want it to move with a given measure or system, but Encore sometimes picks a measure in the system above or below as the anchor.
— Text boxes that are perfectly sized for their contents (“Andante”) will nevertheless grow or shrink if measures are removed or added to the system. Those text boxes then have to be resized manually. (Clicking in, then clicking out works, but is extra work, and any color goes away.) My kludge is to *move* those boxes, allowing them to anchor to other systems/measures that won’t be changing, then after adding notes, Ctrl+J, adding lyrics, Ctrl+J, moving those text boxes back.
— Chant is VERY difficult to do if one wants playback to be meaningful. Essentially, I have to make all measures 16/4, add in notes, then manually fix all measures to their actual time signature (= number of syllables), hiding time signatures and bar lines as I go. Would be great to have some automated way to change all time signatures to the actual number of beats contained. Adding a measure is an absolute nightmare. Cutting and pasting from other chant using the same melody is very difficult because Encore pastes by number of beats rather than by measures, an approach that works just fine for orchestral works or even choral works that maintain the same time signature throughout, but not for chant.
— There is no way to add/delete a measure to/from this system only, i.e. without moving all subsequent measures. If a lot of work has gone into formatting on pages 2 through N of the score, this one issue can add hours of work.
— Similarly, there is no way to add a system somewhere while moving all later systems “down the page” by one, including pushing systems over to the next page when necessary, while maintaining all formatting.
— No way to specify a desired location for a page break, or to force a page break at a specified measure. (In choral work, it is often advantageous, or perhaps simply kinder, to break the page at the end of a phrase, or at longer notes so that there is no sudden “surprise” upon turning the page.)
— Ctrl+J is very much optimized for spacing notes, rather than spacing lyrics. Very long one-syllable words are highly problematic for spacing and even for entering (“through” is probably the best example in English), and Encore can be a bit difficult when such words end up on an eighth notes, followed by some short word a terminal half note in tha measure, as Encore will insist on the half note getting its proper engraving space, at the expense of the lyrics overlapping. Also, if one tries to enter lyrics onto densely packed notes/measures, for example when those measures are still empty, Encore will move parts of words onto the next note rather than expanding the measure to the right or moving measures over or down onto subsequent systems in order to accommodate those lyrics.
— In measures where notes are moved manually (from the Ctrl+J spacing) so that everything looks better and fits (and there is a little white space between syllables and hyphens), there is no way to cause Encore to preserve that custom spacing for subsequent Ctrl+J events. Best option would be to save the customized note spacing as *relative* distances from the left bar line, and to have Ctrl+J respect such relative spacing unless specifically told to undo the custom spacing for that measure. This would save a lot of re-re-editing of note spacing.
I should probably quit at this point. Thank you for anyone who has read this far. Please feel free to write to me for clarification, and I’m happy to share example files to demonstrate these points.