Yes, I saw that thread. Thank you! I don’t center a single whole note in a measure for normal music. It’s only when I’m engraving theory-type worksheets for student books that I often need to position any note value without regard to relative note spacing, but rather just notes arranged on a staff for a given exercise.
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Understood. I came to Dorico (from Finale) after my classroom theory-teaching days were behind me. I know I would have missed the many ways in which music can be notated “wrongly” for making exercises!
I’m not a pedagogue, but why would you not wish to accustom your students to standard notation practice at every opportunity? Does the aesthetic of centring a semibreve in a bar enhance their learning experience? Why would you make a special accommodation for your students that you do not apply to your own work? (baffled)
Here is an example of a theory page in the book to clarify what the author is doing. I don’t write the books; I’m just the graphic artist.
I think these are the sort of worksheets that are difficult (though not impossible) to do in Dorico. You might be better off notating phrases in Dorico and taking graphic slices to use in another design program.
Others are more experienced than I am in this area.
They’re not easy to do in any music software. It was better in Finale than in Sibelius, and now I’m figuring it out in Dorico with trial and error. It sure beats creating them all in Illustrator, printing them out, then pasting them on a page, one-by-one, using a light board with a margin template! That’s how I did it in the early '90s, before Finale got easier to use. Back then, Finale had a “tools” environment that allowed me to move things, but it wasn’t WYSIWYG. So I would have to exit the environment to see how close I got, then go back into the tools window and adjust until I got it right. I think I used a Mac IISE, and each time I went in and out of the tools environment, it would take a while—and sometimes it would crash my computer. Illustrator didn’t get hung up like that, so I just created little music examples in it.
One method which might be also be useful is to use the Voice column X offset in Properties > Note Spacing when in Engrave mode. The amount of offset needed depends on the width of the bar, so you will need to use some trial and error.
Yes, it is a workaround.
Yes, it is not an option which can be set to do it automatically.
No, it does not take very long at all - just a few seconds.
PS If you have multiple staves where the note in each needs to be offset using this method, you can select them all and change their offset all at the same time.
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@Janus, even a language is always evolving, rules will always be changed. Hopefully for the better. I Think a pedagogue would agree
I don’t disagree. But it seems, from the evidence, that the practice of centring semibreves is becoming archaic…
I always centered whole notes in the “bars” of basic music theory exercise sheets for things like interval ID/labeling, etc., since in that context there are no real measures. And, in fact, it’s not actually music at all but rather an abstract collection of pitches shown on five-line staves (perhaps with key sigs). There is no rhythm. The page is simply a “presentation grid,” with “barlines” serving a purely visual signpost function like the borders around sidebars in a book.
Going back to the OP, it seems to me that any “musical” discussion about notation of whole notes on “identify-and-label-these-40-intervals” types of worksheets misses the point.
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