I have an early music score I am preparing which has several long lacunae in some of the voices. For these sections I would like to leave that staff area blank, or include Lyrics under the blank staff. To do this, I have been setting the opacity of the rests to 0% in the colors dialog (including attaching lyrics to rests and setting them to 0% opacity). That does the trick and looks fine ON-SCREEN (or when output to a pdf)… BUT when I print the score to actual paper… large rectangular areas around those transparent rests force other items on the page (including staff lines) to print at some dark shade of gray instead of the default black ink. (see attached images)
The first image (img816) shows the problem clearly - barlines on the top staves have been removed, so there is one default rest in each staff with an opacity of 0, causing a rectangular area to become shaded in grey instead of black. (N.B.: some of the notes on the bottom staff are colored in red - they are printing correctly at grayscale).
The second image (img819) is another example with several rests (on the top staff) having an opacity of 0. You can see this affects staff lines and lyrics. Is there a way to force Dorico to simply ignore items at 0% opacity instead of trying to print them?
Also, on the Mac, I can get ‘dotty’ output on solid black music if the Color Management is turned on in the print menu (Color Matching: turn off ‘ColorSync’ and turn on ‘In Printer’.)
You may also get better results if you export as a PDF set to Mono. Or Colour, depending on what you’re currently using.
I was printing in B/W. I could remove some rests, I guess. However, there are places where I attach lyrics to rests, in places where there are missing notes in the original manuscript source - I am doing this because I wanted to place the text in an approximate location with respect to existing music in other parts, but I did not want to attempt an editorial reconstruction.
Anyway, regardless of printer settings, objects which are completely transparent should not have any affect on the clarity or greyscale-ness of other objects that happen to be within a large rectangular area around the transparent items…
The handling of transparent objects has long been a source of trouble when sending data to printers, which have no understanding of transparency. Somewhere along the line, that transparency has to be ‘flattened’, and interpreted in a non-transparent way.
