Change size of multiple text items in a score

There are still settings that don’t save for me in 3.5.1 unless I make another change. If I open Paragraph Styles, change the alignment of Staff Labels, hit ok, then reopen Paragraph Styles, the setting did not save. Not sure if this is the same bug he is experiencing, but there definitely are still issues with Paragraph Styles saving and updating.

Hmm. So maybe the reason it worked for me is that I literally created the paragraph style, named it, flicked the border switch and then immediately starred it.

Taniyo, perhaps try going into Paragraph Styles, selecting your Bordered Text style, flicking a couple of switches on and off (checking that an asterisk appears next to the style in the left panel, then hit the Star.

Daniel commented on the 3.5.1 Paragraph Styles issue on 8/6 saying:
"I can now reproduce the problem: if you go into the Paragraph Styles dialog and click the “save as default” button for a style you’ve not edited during that session of the dialog, it fails, due to a small logical error in the dialog code, which we’ll fix. In the meantime, you should find that if you make some changes to the style in the dialog session, you can successfully save it as a default. "

Gotcha. Apologies - it hadn’t occurred to me that anyone would attempt to save a paragraph style as default some time after actually creating the paragraph style.

Thanks all, your instructions worked! Love this forum :slight_smile:

There’s useful information here, thanks all. But I’d still like to be able to change the properties of multiple text items - i’m finally embarking on some mass Sibelius to Dorico conversion, and this seems to be one of the big sticking points with MusicXML conversion.

At the moment, what were formerly Boxed System Text in Sibelius are appearing as staff-attached, Default Text in Dorico. Daniel stated back in 2018 that “There is no way to convert staff-attached text to system-attached text, I’m afraid.”

Can anyone confirm whether or not that’s still the case?

At the moment, my quickest solution would seem to be manually re-entering every piece of System text (which for my first batch of scores to convert, tends to be every section, so potentially dozens per Flow).

I’m afraid it’s still the case that you can’t turn a staff-attached text item into a system-attached text item. I’ve just run some experiments here and it turns out that Sibelius (at least the latest version, on this machine) encodes system text as staff text in MusicXML. Even if I alter the Boxed System Text Style (in Sibelius) so that it shows the Boxed System Text on each stave, it’s actually encoding the (same) items on each stave as separate staff-attached text objects.

Hi, sorry for my slow reply. Thanks for looking into this for me, and confirming that the problem stems from Sibelius encoding.

@dspreadbury - Might there be the option of adding a preference to import staff text as system text under MusicXML preferences to deal with this?

Or (probably of use to more people) the option to convert text from one to the other (including with multiple selections)?

I don’t think it would be a good idea to have an option to import all text items in MusicXML files as system-attached text, but in principle I think having a feature to convert staff-attached text to system-attached text or vice versa is not a bad idea, and perhaps we can add such a thing in future.

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