Colour - chord symbols / highlighting bars

Dorico
1

I’m working on composing a piece for a quartet - and would find it helpful to make the text of some chord symbols or the background to the staff lines in one measure / bar coloured (for example it would highlight elements of the composition whilst it is “work in progress” and tell me to go back and think more deeply as to how well that chord / chord sequence e works).

Is this presently achievable or is it something that would be supported as a new feature in a version 4.x of Dorico Pro?

Thanks

2

You can easily change the color of chord symbol text and many other objects. I don’t know an easy way to add a background color to a bar at present.

But for your purpose I recommend the comments feature. They attach to a staff at a rhythmic position, you can view them as a list in the panel on the right, and they can even be exported as an html page for review. I assigned a keyboard shortcut to View > Comments since I like to hide/show the signposts often.

3

Thank you Mark - you say I can “easily change colour of chord symbols” - please would explain how, as so far I cannot see any option to invoke colour only strike through or underline.

Thanks

Stephen Bashforth
stephen.bashforth@icloud.com

4
  • Select one or more objects of the same type
  • In the Properties panel (at the bottom) under Common, turn on the Color switch
  • Click on the black square to open the color picker

(For printing or export to PDF, note that you must do it in color, otherwise colored objects come out black.)

1 Like
5

Hi Mark,

THANK YOU !

It works - and it is really helpful. I must have had a mental block - I didn’t try the properties panel!

Many thanks

Stephen Bashforth
stephen.bashforth@icloud.com

6

Hi
I wanna know How I highlight the bar itself?

7

Hi @goldstringsusa, and welcome to the forum! By “highlight” do you mean select the music? As the manual says, “To select everything in a bar, click on the staff in that bar, but not on any notes, stems, or items.”

If you mean you want to draw a color tint over a bar, Dorico doesn’t have a way to do that. Could you give more details about your purpose for this?

1 Like
8

Thank you very much.

I have another question. How I can change in the middle to a other instrument?

9

With some effort, it is possible to draw a color tint over a bar:

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Create an instance of staff text containing several copies of the full block Unicode character (U+2588), adjust the font size of the text as needed, disable collision avoidance and position the text over the bar to be highlighted. Then change its Color in the properties panel to the desired mostly transparent color. For the example above on Windows, the color is set to yellow and the Alpha channel is set to 64.

2 Likes
10

In Dorico what you do is:

  • Give the player both instruments, and
  • in galley view, write the music for each instrument on the appropriate staff

Result: In page view Dorico automatically shows only the instrument with music, and notices for when to switch instruments. See the manual for details.

2 Likes
11

Hi Mark,

THANK YOU !

It works - and it is really helpful.

Many thanks

Dov Goldklang