If you wanted ALL arpeggios to be always red, then you could change the colour in the Music Symbols editor of the Arpeggiation Up and Down “wiggle”, and arrow, and swash.
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Applying colors to time signatures (and/or other elements) seems like a popular request. I have done this in all my Sibelius files where it’s relevant, somewhat surprised that after 5 versions of Dorico, this is still not easy/working.
Jazz musicians often work in low-light situations, and we need all the help we can get to take not of things.
You’ll be able to set a colour override for time signatures in the next update, when it arrives.
Thanks, Daniel. Are there any plans for being able to re-colour any element on a score (including staff lines, etc.)?
No concrete plans for the ability to comprehensively change the colour of every element in the score. no. Each item that supports colour needs separate implementation, so building this capability for absolutely every item in the score represents a significant effort.
I’d be interested to learn more about your use cases for colouring things like staff lines. I’m aware of some educational use cases (e.g. the Colourstrings method) but I’m always curious to know about new use cases, as that may influence the priority that we assign to these kinds of development tasks.
Thanks Daniel. I certainly understand I’m a bit of an edge case here.
I lay out my use case in the original post. Summary is: I use a screen to show a melody line and lyrics, and I want to visually emphasize the lyrics by having only them be black and everything else on the screen be a medium grey. So the notation is there as a guide, but not given the same visual weight as the lyrics.
Two use cases for coloring staff lines. One is for chant notation, either replicas of original (where one line is red and the other yellow) or 18th-late 19th c. customs of all red staves: (Red MS Staves) these editions were once luxuries (double printing) so a number of recent computer editing software has brought it back: Like here
The other reason for colored staves is that a lot of us who have worked with Vexflow think that choosing to have dark gray but not black staves by default is probably the most brilliant choice they have made — on music that is never intended to be printed out (like most of what I work with) they make a nice compromise between having slightly thicker staff lines (so they can scale down better on the monitor and still be legible) but still not too bold. (This Artusi lesson mixes Finale-exported images and Vexflow-live generation for various technical reasons (“Parallels acceptable after a fermata” is Vexflow; “Doubled leading tones in A minor” is Finale), and as we switch to mostly Dorico, it would be good if those styles could match better. (We will always need some Vexflow for generating examples on the fly)
Making most items be gray is also a great way to have annotations/analysis/roman numerals, etc. stand out more in places where they’re actually more important than the music. (Thanks!)
Hi Daniel! A use case brought by someone in the Facebook forum was regarding colour blind or other visually impaired users. Something I have to admit I hadn’t thought of but that absolutely makes sense. Although a system-wide setting for the interface to change for those users might be another options. Anyways, just food for thought.
Hi Daniel, any movement on this? For a lot of my work this is a Dorico deal-breaker.
This takes just seconds in MuseScore:
And in admittedly minutes, with Lilypond I can also get the ledger lines
You can’t colour stems, beams, accidentals, or ledger lines in Dorico at present, but it’s certainly possible that we may extend this in future. We could potentially add engraving options to specify which parts of a note should be affected by overriding the colour, e.g. to include stems, accidentals, and articulations. A beam could take its colour from the first note under the beam, potentially. But we don’t have any concrete plans to work on that immediately.