NOTATIO

100% OT, but Fred and Ben I notice you both use what I think is called ‘dark mode’: why? My 80-year old eyes find it seriously difficult to read. So much so that when CD, or more often opera DVD booklets do this, I don't bother to read them. Perhaps (I don't know) this is as much personal as age. I never really did like ‘candle lit’ restaurants (but then quite a lot of my childhood and adolescence, even early adulthood, was with oil lamps rather than electricity). Nowadays I find many theatre and especially opera productions so dark that I end up shutting my eyes. However, it's not as simple as one might suppose (is anything?), as I still seem to have better night sight outdoors in the countryside, even on a really dark night, than most people I know.

Anyway: why dark mode?

I don't know, I guess I find it easier on my eyes than all the glare from white. I use it for any app that supports it and I honestly had forgotten Dorico even had a light theme. In Dorico, dark mode seems to keep the focus on the music. I don't have an issue with the lack of contrast yet, but I did recently get my first pair of progressives so my eyes aren't as young as they once were, LOL!

Printed booklets can be very hard to read as white text 'reversed out' of a colour: that's often made worse if the background uses two inks and the register (alignment) is poor. However, on a screen, which is creating light rather than reflecting it, I find white on black much less tiring. Apparently, the demand for Dark Mode came from software developers, who have to read through lines of code all day.

It's not always easier to read, though:

To my eyes, the problem with white text on a dark background is that it makes the text less distinct. White is more expansive than black, which often makes the boundaries of graphic elements slightly uncertain.

I don't know of a scientific explanation for this, but I would imagine that what is more tiring for the eyes isn't so much the amount of white, but having to strain the focus on blurry detail. There might be some truth in white being tiring when having too much of it, though. Or, that the too sharp contrast between pure white and black is. So, I personally prefer the light grey background of the example above.

The fact that a computer screen produces white as light has never bothered me. I never have the brightness of the screen set to maximum.

I didn't care for the Dorico dark mode either, mainly because it looks so unnatural, and switched to black on white after a while. Dark mode doesn't seem possible in Finale because the staff and clefs cannot change color, but a beige background is soothing.

Finale does have a Dark mode: but (as with Dorico) it doesn't apply to the actual 'page' itself. White notation on a black page would look very weird. It's just for the menus and dialogs. You can change the background 'paper' colour in Dorico, as with Finale.

On another forum there's a, perhaps not main theme, but surely a leitmotif, about MM's lack of interest in what's discussed about their product. That's not the impression I've got of Steinberg's attitude to the Dorico users. And that's why I assumed that a part of the shaping of their program was actually taking place here. If not the posters here already have brought their discussion to the Dorico forum. So much better in that case.
Please don't feel obliged to reply.

Thanks, Ben. I was misremembering that about the Dorico dark mode.

But if the Dorico dark mode only applies to menus and such, why would that prevent eye strain? Engravers spend hours a day with their eyes fixated on large, white, constantly-emitting pages of music, not dialogue boxes.

Sorry about continuing on with this off-topic. I am going to try to catch up soon with the very interesting discussion that you are having with Fred. G. Unn, perhaps from the Finale point of view, since this subject came up over at the Dorico site a while ago concerning the triplet beam fluctuation. Do you happen to remember the title of that thread?

Do you mean this one?

https://forums.steinberg.net/t/horizont ... ent/735262

That's the one I was referring to in some of my examples.

That's it. Thanks, Ben.