NOTATIO

How fluently does Dorico do this sort of thing, done here in Finale 26.3 where although possible it is a bit of a fiddle? (FYI crotchet [quarter] = 54)

It's very easy.

Highlight the three measures, select "ossia above" from the context menu, and Bob's your uncle.

RMK wrote: ↑03 Jul 2023, 14:32 and Bob's your uncle.

He prefers to be called Robert.

This took under 5 mins. There's no prefatory clef or "ossia" label, I grant you. But the ossia is automatically given more space. The only manual adjustments I made were slightly moving the lyric syllables away from the dashed barlines.

There is a way to get the prefatory clef.

IIRC you have to move the "+1 staff" signpost back an eighth or so, then you enter an explicit clef.

I find ossias in Dorico to be incredibly easy. If you want the clef, just add it. If you want any sort of label, there's a setting in Layout Options / Ossias and Extra Staves.

In Finale there seem to be two approaches that can work.

1) One can add an extra stave throughout a file for the ossia which one then hides everywhere except where needed. This can cause temporary confusion if the ossia is a late addition, as can often be the case, to a score with an otherwise fully formatted layout. But once the stave is hidden elsewhere, the confusion should evaporate.

2) As in the case I posted above, one can reveal an otherwise hidden existing stave which currently has no music on it. Here it is the voice stave immediately above the one currently in use. This seems to work simply enough in this case, but it would, I imagine, create something close to havoc if the stave were an instrumental one linked to a set of parts.

I find making ossia measures in Dorico far simpler than in Finale, and also much more stable.

my only issue with Dorico's function is that it does not allow one to hide/show per instance ossia measures.

it's a bit too "all or nothing". if you want to show ossia measures in the score, it will show ALL instances of it. But if you don't want ossia measures showing, absolutely none will show.

I had a bit of an issue in my violin concerto where I needed the ossia measures for a series of contrabass harmonics (there were two ways of achieving the same result), but then later in the concerto, there was an ossia passage in the solo which was not necessary for the score.
I was stuck with either showing the contrabass ones and solo ones, or showing none at all.

I'm not sure what you mean, Michel -- you can aways use Staff Visiblity to hide a given ossia.

In Dorico?
why the heck didn't someone tell me this when I first brought it up on the Steinberg/Dorico forum?

As far as I could tell, if I wanted the ossia for the orchestral basses to show, then I also had to have the ossia for the solo violin show, despite me NOT wanting it to show. In the options for ossia visibility, it only gave the option of show all or hide all. there was no case-by-case, nor only one staff option.

I will have to revisit that particular score now, to see how I can fix this.


EDIT:

I just tried this, and nothing I do will hide an ossia staff individually.
if you can, please tell me how you did it.