Whatever is in the brackets is the total number of beats; the number after the / is the unit of pulse. Is the case above, the first 4 beats will appear like a 4/4 bar, the ones after like 1/4 bars, with no bar line, of course. As there are seven beats total, the meter sig is 7/4.
This is exactly what I needed. Thanks. I fail to understand why Dorico’s online docs have no images for nearly all subjects. This is just a wall of text with no common visual examples. Thanks for your help - much appreciated.
Thanks for the explanation. Still working on wrapping my silly brain around it, but I will experiment in front of Dorico with your comments and solidify it.
That page is from the v1 desktop manual, which hasn’t been updated for some time.
The most recent version of this page is here. The preceding page shows an excerpt of music that has several successive bars with different meters, and also points you towards Notation Options for Beaming and Note Grouping, which you might well find also affect the beaming in your example. Another thing to be aware of is if changing time signatures or notation options haven’t affected beaming, there might be beaming overrides in play (especially on files imported via XML) so resetting beaming is often worth a try.
In general, you’ll mainly find example images on pages that explain concepts or at the end of steps, comparing how things look before/after an operation or what the various choices end up looking like. There aren’t pictures on every page because there are in the region of 2000 separate pages. However, I’ll make a note that this is an instance where a musical example might be beneficial to add.
You can find example popover entries for the time signatures popover here. 3/4 means a 3/4 time signature. What the denominator (bottom number) in time signatures means is described here.