Hello,
I usually like gradual tempo indications (“rit.,” “rall.,” “accell.,” etc.) to appear in italic, not-bold type. This is easy enough to set up in Dorico, but the “A tempo” indication seems to be considered an “immediate tempo,” and so still shows up in the bold type of regular tempo indications. Is there any way to get Dorico to consider “A tempo” to be a gradual tempo indication?
Thanks,
Julian Bennett Holmes
I’m afraid there’s at present no way to do this, Julian. It’s a bit of a pain, but you should be able to set up a paragraph style in Engrave > Paragraph Styles that matches the look of the ‘Gradual tempo text font’ font style and then insert some text that looks the same.
Thanks for your response! This makes sense — I assume this text would be added as “Shift-X” text?
The main issue I foresee is that this wouldn’t be picked up by the playback engine presumably…
Yes, that’s correct. Unfortunately you can’t hide a “real” tempo indication at the moment, which is something else that we also need to do, so you would have to live without correct playback at present.
Yep — that’s how I would solve something like this in Finale.
Has this been addressed? And how does one enter other tempo indications that are not in the gradual list, like ritenuto, rubato, smorzando, stretto etc. in italics? As text, dynamics, or playing techniques?
What you can do is enter a regular tempo indication and change the text manually in Properties eg Shift+T>[rall.]>Enter>Properties>[change it to what you want].
For other indications, such as "rubato’, you can make Default Text system text if you like, by pressing Shift+Alt+T rather than just Shift+T to create the text in the popover. You could then make that text italic in the dialog. Or, you could create your own paragraph style that is automatically however you want it, enter it with the steps above and then change the paragraph style to your custom one from the dropdown list.
This ‘flaw’ has been discussed before in other threads and while you can set up various workarounds with styles etc. to get the proper ‘look’, you will not have the internal functionality of a proper tempo, reverting the tempo back to the original or jumping to prev/next place with arrow keys, select more etc. I hope all this will be fixed in D6, with a more general approach to “tempo words”.
Aha. Very clever. I had no idea that the italic font would “stick” no matter what you input under Text. That will solve this issue.
I am only concerned about notation at this point, Mats_Frendahl, so this will work well enough. These loose ends are quite surprising in such a well-designed program and I am with you in hoping they get cleared up.