Change multiple bar lines

Hello!

I want to know how to change multiple barlines. I have a project where I use dashed lines. I would like to select a lot of measures and apply dashed lines on all, but I don’t know how to do that… Now, I’m puttin one by one, for sure there is another way.

Best wishes,

Carlos

Welcome to the forum @carlos80 !

If you want all barlines in a flow to be dashed, or at least more than half, you can change the default barline type in the flow.

Otherwise, a slightly quicker way than inputting each one anew is to input one, then copy it elsewhere.

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Hi @Lillie_Harris,

Note that selecting multiple barlines and trying to change them simultaneously via the popover doesn’t work, e.g.

image

‘Shift-B, ||’ gives this

image

@dspreadbury in case this would be worth fixing, obviously is useful for changing multiple individual barlines all at once.

It’s not a case of fixing it, since it’s not intended that it works this way, but I agree that it would be a useful way to extend Dorico’s functionality.

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… hence my suggestion to input one, then copy it :wink: this is generally consistent with how inputting stuff in Dorico works across the board.

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Since I understood from the start that barlines are a product of time signatures in Dorico, I never expected to be able to change more than one at a time. It is interesting that we can select more than one barline at a time, if there is no operation we can do on them all at once.

Related to this, I think it would be helpful if the left & right arrow keys could select the previous and next barline, as they do for other system objects.

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Well they’re a derivative of (the last) time sig, which implies it’s reasonable to be able to select multiple. BTW Daniel & Lillie I hijacked this thread just to avoid making a new one on a related topic, not trying to say this should have been there from the beginning folks!

Hijacking further and speaking of selecting, in this exercise sheet I found myself doing a lot of repetitive actions. Onesuch was playing in a chord, then selecting all the bass notes and moving them to the bottom axis. AFAIK the only way to select all those bass notes was to click and select, searching and experimenting didn’t find another way.

So expanding on that idea the enhancement could be “Select by similar element left/right and up/down”. This page Selecting more items of the same type is more of an automatic selection.

You can filter to select just the bottom notes in the selection.

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Your link points to the Dorico 3 manual; the equivalent page in the Dorico Pro 4 manual is here.

As Mark says, you can filter notes according to their position in chords.

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Has this been changed? Is there still no way to change the normal bar lines of the selected multiple bars to dashed bar lines? I can select

  • multiple bars, and
  • all elements in a stream including all bar lines.
    However, I cannot select all bar lines in a range of bars, for example from bar 1 to bar 20. I have to select individual bar lines by clicking on them one at a time. This is very tedious and time consuming.

Actually there is. You can delete all selected barlines in one go. Occasionally I’ve found this useful, although I agree that it would be handy to ‘extend Dorico’s functionality’ to be able to select (filter for) multiple barlines and perform group functions on them.

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but barlines can’t be copy-pasted? At least, I can’t manage to do it – I’m trying to copy and paste double barlines (which happen to also be where there are time signture changes) and dorico insists on copying both or neither, and usually one grid unit earlier than the item selected.

Changing multiple barlines at once would be great, if that can be allowed — it would make sense with how other items work? (i.e. changing properties of multiple items at once.)

An explicit barline (which is a hidden time sig) can be repeatedly copied elsewhere with Alt-click. But for a double barline at a meter change, you do have to copy both at once, as you’ve seen. Unfortunately explicit barlines are not properties that are exposed in the lower zone.


To the team: I note that, after copying, the barline is no longer highlighted orange, but (with signposts hidden) is still invisibly selected, since I can Alt-click to copy it again. This is useful, but the display is inconsistent with Dorico’s normal behavior, where only what is visible can be selected, and only what is selected will be copied.

This is useful to know, thanks. I wonder why they are coupled like that… It doesn’t make sense.

Simply because barlines are generated by meters in Dorico. They are “the same thing”.

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