Due to the limitation of cross staff with kits, I had to create versions of a treble clef staff with 1 to 5 lines to accommodate cross staff for my percussion sets.
But I don’t think my question is related to that. I just mention this in case it has anything to do with my issue…
The issue is that, if I copy the contents of the bottom player and paste it to the player above (exactly same set of staves with percussion clefs), the cross staff does not paste well. As you can see, the lower staff material is merged in the middle staff.
Hi @maresz, it would be helpful if you could upload a Dorico file example, for someone to experiment without the need of trying to reproduce your setup.
Hi @maresz, and thank you for the file. I can reproduce your issue, which is independent from your specific setup.
Here an easier example that shows the issue: cross staff assignation is partially lost after pasting (only the first “level” of cross staff is maintained with the specific cross staff notes merged):
@maresz
Some further progress here: using Paste special>Paste into voice>Up-stem voice 1 (or any voice you choose), the cross staff situation is maintained:
after trying this, it does not work in my real case unfortunately
I have to do the “pasting into voice” in a different flow and it does not seem to work anymore…
Also, it doesn’t work if you have more than one system of staves like in the following example.
Yes Paste Special seems to works, in this case, only inside the same flow, and inside the same staves. Probably the cross staff ID for each note is flow and staff/system dependent (just my thought).
(It would be nice to have some background information. here, @Richard_Lanyon?)
I’m afraid Dorico’s support for beaming between different instruments (as opposed to different staves of the same instrument) is quite limited. The way that cross-staff beaming works internally is that the note has a special property that says what staff it is going to appear on. When pasting this property has to be remapped in order to deal with copying and pasting between, say, two different pianos, but this special handling is only designed to deal with staves that belong to the same instrument.
Nevertheless, I still hope there will be a thorough discussion on this issue internally and that the development team will put some more love into cross-staff.
Limiting cross-staff to the same instrument or a certain type of stave is really too restrictive.
As it stands, a very large part of 20th-century percussion writing is inaccessible to Dorico.
I am currently living a nightmare involving cross-staff notation between systems and/or staves of different types…
My feature request’s would include :
allow cross staff between any type of percussion stave and standard 5 line staves.
allow cross staff between different instruments
allow copy paste of cross staff material between different parts or flows of the score
ps
I would bet that this is more needed by 2026 composers then aleatoric boxes.
I’m not sure for engravers…
