Fugalicious, I LOVE Dorico. I find that I can make very lovely transcriptions of chant as evidenced above. Part of the reason that Dorico is so great is because it has native support for unrestricted open meter. It's very easy to input chant, adjust note spacing to taste, and then just plunk barlines where you want them. As of yet, there is no support for square note notation, but for the people in the pews at my N.O. church there's no need for that anyway. Modern transcriptions work all the better. One trick that I use (which is in the PDF above) is to add dummy measures when the music doesn't stretch all the way across the bar, so that the barline will be in the right place but the staff lines continue to the margin. This gives the proper look and spacing which is really nice. Stemless notes are supported natively; you just input all the notes regular, filter them and then hit a little setting toggle and all the stems are gone in 1 second. All told, I'll never revert back to any other program, I love Dorico that much. I've used F & S and none of them can draw me back.
Another nice thing that I've mentioned elsewhere: you can have multiple "movements" (so-called "flows") in one file so when you export everything, it is all perfectly matched together with the same settings. You can prepare a whole Mass/Service in one file and export all at once.
I do this type of work for our parish regularly. I generate all the musical excerpts in the same Dorico file and then export them as SVGs (vector image files) and then drage them into affinity publisher to finish the rest. Although, in truth, you could do this entire worship aid natively in Dorico if you were determined enough (which I have done in the past); I simply find that using a dedicated publishing software can speed up the typography aspects of these projects.
I'm also attaching the Ordinary aid that I created this year. We had them printed and laminated by a local print shop and kept them in the pews for all of Advent (will do the same for Lent but with Ave Regina Cælorum). As you can see, Dorico can really create some beautiful scores especially if you put in a little effort to go the extra mile by hand.
Thanks! I nerd out on engraving a little bit... (I believe that we should still be producing beautiful liturgical/religious books just like the old days!)
To participate in the discussions on Catholic church music, sign in or register as a forum member, The forum is a project of the Church Music Association of America.