Creating dashed or tick bar lines in middle of bar

Dorico
1

I’m interested in having dashed or tick bar lines in a middle of a line to demarcate beat divisions of long measures.

In my situation, I have a set of Seguirillas I’ve written. This is based upon the Flamenco compas of 2 + 2 + 3 + 3 + 2. I’m using a 12/4 time signature with that beat division [ 2+2+3+3+2/4 ] . 12/4 is a long measure, and it would be nice to have the dashed or ticked bar lines (at the beat divisions) that don’t act like true bar lines (e.g., resetting accidentals, changing bar numbers, etc.).

Is there a way to do this?

Thanks!
hsf

PS For Flamenco aficionados, I’m aware of many differences in the ways a Flamenco traditionalist would count - my focus is making the music readable to the typical piano student in a way that honors the compas.

2

It sounds like you’re looking for an “aggregate” time signature. Types of time signatures

You could also create a dashed barline at any point in a bar. Click on the note and type Shift-B, “dashed,” or type a colon.

3

Something I find bewildering about the Dorico help is that many of the help pages are like this one. They define something, suggesting it is possible, but then offer no way to find out HOW to do it. Help pages are supposed to help. Am I missing something?

I understand if the author didn’t want to clutter that particular page with implementation details, but there should be hyperlinks that go to the “How to” material.

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4

There is, at the bottom of the page: “time signatures popover.” I suppose I should have linked to that one.

5

Thanks! That will suffice. Would love to see 12/4 at the beginning instead of the 2/4 + 2/4 + 3/4 + 3/4 + 2/4 , but I’m guessing the latter is more standard (and perhaps more clear).

For future readers, this is entered as: 2/4|2/4|3/4|3/4|2/4

6

In case it helps, the reason the manual can be quite compartmentalised is because of the structure we use to write it, which allows us to publish both PDF and webhelp formats from a single source. In order to keep track of the manual’s content across the thousands of files required, we do sometimes have to be quite strict in what we do and don’t include in various places.

In cases like this, relevant links are always at the bottom and sometimes pointers to this are included in the text - here, the related links include both the Time signatures popover and Input methods for time signatures, as you can input time signatures in two ways: using the popover, and using the panel. Trying to explain that at the same time as describing the different types of time signatures would result in a fairly complicated topic whose contents might not be immediately obvious from the title.

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