I’m pleased to discover that in Dorico I can make a score like the first screen grab, but disappointed about how it looks on the part (second screen grab). So my questions are:
Is there a way to make hand placement of notes (notes and beam angles) and staff text in a score transfer over to the part?
Is there a way to make parts maintain the score’s note head size changes (notice the parenthesized sounding harmonic pitch).
I know there are difficulties transferring placement of items to a part, but I’m wondering if maybe there’s a way to lock things into a relationship with the staff or the notes so spacing algorithms can’t touch them.
The main culprit between changes in the score not carrying through to the parts here is the property scope: if you move or change items with the property scope set to Locally, then any changes to local properties (which generally includes their graphical position) won’t affect other layouts that those items appear in.
You can propagate properties from the score to the part later, if you didn’t have the scope set to Globally at the time of the change.
Tip: when moving text items a substantial distance from their default position, disable collision avoidance first (so they don’t continue to be accounted for in vertical spacing calculations)
A suggestion about how to handle your bold arrow across empty bars:
If you want to keep multi-bar rests in the part in other places, then add something across this region that will split the multi-bar rest, to keep the affected bars visible: eg a chord symbol region.
Note that removing rests leaves Dorico with nothing to use for spacing: that’s why bar 3 is oddly spaced after the single crotchet (quarter) rest at the start, in the part. In the score the spacing is only retained because other parts have written music, to determine the spacing for the whole system.
Wow… Thanks, Lillie! This gives me a lot to work with! I just experimented and got good results with propagate properties and turning off collision avoidance. I also used the chord symbol region to keep my rests from collapsing on the part.
It seems for rhythmic placement of the arrow, the ends of it need to be attached to a note or rest on the staff, right? I did try attaching it to bar lines, but then it belongs to the top staff of that instrument group (so I can’t get one to be placed on the staff of the 2nd violins). It also doesn’t seem possible to select a rest on one end and a bar line on the other (I tried doing that but failed). From what I read in the manual, it seems impossible to attach it to a rhythmic place in an empty bar. Is this correct?
You need to be able to select something at the positions where you want the line in order to input it, but that doesn’t have to be a note or rest (unless your line is notehead-attached), and you can also lengthen/shorten/move it later, eg if you don’t have a note at the exact beat that you want. That can be a fairly quick way of getting the line length you want without rewriting your music to fit.
Barlines that come from a global time signature don’t give Dorico staff-specific positioning info (because they technically apply to all staves). You need to select something that belongs only to Violin 2, like a note, rest, dynamic, playing technique etc.
In general, I’d be careful about removing rests when there’s nothing else musically on the staff: it affects the note spacing, and reduces your selection options. There are often other ways of getting the same result: eg in this case, inputting a basic sequence of notes, then hiding their noteheads, ledger lines (if needed), and stems.
