I’d love to have the option of having bar numbers appear both at the beginning of every system AND also every N (usually 5) bars. Is this possible?
At present, not automatically. To achieve this you would have to turn bar numbers on for every bar and then manually suppress all the extras you don’t want via multi-selection and hiding in the properties panel.
I hope that Dorico 5 will permit us to show bar numbers on a selective basis, and not merely hide them. I like to mark particular bars where something is likely to require rehearsal but doesn’t warrant a rehearsal mark. (Sounds contradictory but it isn’t.) You might use rehearsal marks for larger structural moments, but also want to make it easy to find a particular bar, without displaying bar numbers on every single measure.
Another option is to create a paragraph style that matches the bar number, font, and then selectively use that to add bar numbers manually every so often.
It’s these little peculiarities that Dorico doesn’t handle as well as it could.
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Hm, that’s rather a complicated workaround for something that seems very common and useful!
(The Finale way was that you didn’t have to choose one “mode” of bar numbers – beginning of the system, every N bars, etc. – but you could actually select several, which is exactly what I was looking for here, and would perhaps not be so difficult to implement?)
Seems like I’ll be going the paragraph style route. Many thanks for your quick response!
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Hi,
Unless you have 5 bars every system…
You could thougth use Bar Numbers and Rehersal Marks togheter to get what you want.
Set the bar numbers to show every system.
In Engraving options>Rehersal marks, set a) sequence type to “Bar numbers” b) Enclosure type to “none” c) “Minimum distance ouside staff” to the same value as: Layout options>Bar numbers Minimum distance ouside staff"
Then give the paragraph style of Rehersal Marks the same values of the paragraph style of Bar numbers. (Edit, this is what @Romanos suggested above)
To enter a rehersal mark every 5 bars (even if you have many, many bars, it is easy) enter the first rehersal mark at the bar you want, copy it five bars forward, with one rehersal mark still selected, use select more, all rehersal marks will be selected, press r, select more again and then r, or just r, soon you’ll have as many as you want.
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You can use bar number changes for this, at least.
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Sorry to be thick about this, but how would I go about using bar number changes to resolve this situation?
Sorry, Ian, perhaps my reply wasn’t clear enough (I tried to include the relevant part of James’s post to try to provide some context). You can’t really use bar number changes to satisfy your request: you can use them to show a bar number at a particular bar, which is what James was wanting to do, but it doesn’t provide a means of showing bar numbers both at the start of every system and then at every n bars.
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I’m going to add this trick to my toolkit. It never occurred to me to try this. Thanks!
Yes, and it even offers a “Continue Primary” option, so if the number of bars should change, the manually added numbers will stay correct.
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I’m trying to achieve something similar. Can someone help explain? The conductor is asking for bar numbers on every measure but I personally would also like to see a bar number at the start of every system. It’s a 90 minute opera and I am looking for a quick way to go about this. Thank you!
If there are bar numbers on every measure, won’t that also include the measure at the start of the system?
No, these are located at the bottom of the score. I want a small bar number in the top left corner at the start of each system.
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There’s no good way to achieve this at the moment, I’m afraid. You would need something like Finale’s ability to create and overlay multiple bar number regions to achieve this, and Dorico doesn’t have that feature at the moment.
Hi,
You may try with a “numbered bar region”
If the staff at the bottom is always the same player, it may be “easy”, if not you may need to create several “numbered bar regions”, besides you will need to create at least 1 numbered bar region for every flow.
In Layout options:
-Bar Numbers - Set your Bar numbers to show every system and to show above top staff of system.
-Players>Numbered Bar Regions - checked “Show bar count in numbered regions” (in the score layout is unchecked by default)
In Engraving options>
-Bar Repeats>Numbered Bar Regions - Number every 1 bar, Placement of bar relative to the staff “Below staff”, and so on, accordingly to how you want the numbers to look.
In Write mode>
Select the first bar of the bottom staff, then select untill the end of flow and then create a numbered bar region. The bar numbers will show with the values you gave in Engraving options. Repeat for every flow.
The numbers displayed in the numbered bar regions use the “Bar Repeat Count” Font style, in case you want to change it to look the same as the “Bar numbers” paragrph style.
But take into account that Font styles do not have so many formatting options as Paragraph styles, for example if you want your numbers to have a enclosure/border you may need a font that includes such borders.