Anyone got any bright ideas on the best way to recreate the smear symbols on “wild” and “time”?
There’s a jazz ornament “smear” that’s a little wiggle symbol that you could use, or create a custom playing technique, or repurpose an articulation that you’re definitely not going to use (replace its glyph with a short angled line in the Edit Music Symbol dialog).
I think my main struggle is getting consistent positioning above/below noteheads.
Here is the result replacing the ‘Stress above’ and ‘Stress below’ symbols, and this is with both above and below glyphs with a Y Offset of -2.5, and articulations of stress allowed inside staff with natural placement:
(and I know I can edit placement manually in engrave mode, just trying to see if there’s a way to get good automatic results first)
In Engraving Options > Articulations > Vertical Position > Advanced Options, have you also allowed stress articulations inside the staff?
Yeah I have, as you can see in the last screenshot the articulation on the centre line is definitely getting inside the staff, although it’s getting placed on a line instead of a space for some reason.
Dorico generally does clever stuff to make sure things don’t automatically collide with staff lines in a way that would be confusing.
Given that your initial screenshot had the smears outside the staff anyway, perhaps fixing up the odd few that do need to go inside isn’t so bad? Off the top of my head I can’t think of anything more precise, I’m afraid (although someone else may well be able to).
No worries, thanks for your help Lillie! There’ll only be a couple of moments where I’ll need manual fixes so no big deal.