Custom barline request

There are many types of barlines used by different composers. It would be great to have a double thick single one, and a double thick pair (such as seen in Haydn). I’m not sure if this is in the feature request queue and pardon me if I repeat myself, but I’d love to see this feature, even if limited to purely being able to adjust the thickness of individual barlines for a start, not just globally.

Sure you can hack this with lines but other programs (the one starting with L) let you make custom barlines and I do need it quite a lot.

Andro, have a look at the barline panel. There is at least one more, than one would expect. It is a double thick line barline. I was surprised to find it there.

I don’t see a double thick barline in the side panel.

However, I note that the popover manual offers a triple single barline, which isn’t in the side panel. It doesn’t list ‘thick’, which works for a single-thick barline, but I can’t find a double-thick code.

What I mean by double thick is two thick barlines close together, not a single double thickness one. Ambiguous terminology!

oh yes, I am sorry, I meant the (single) double thick barline.

In the unlikely situation where you don’t actually need repeats, you can modify the double repeat sign to get what you want:

Create the gap in Engraving Options and delete the dot from Music Symbols. Obviously not very practical if you need actual repeats, but just throwing it out as an option if you don’t.

I need repeats. I need other barlines too, such as extremely thick ones, hence my request for being able to roll your own. That’s a nice idea though.

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Is there any update on this feature request? I would like to create a number of historical barlines – including segno serpento, double thick, etc. – to be able to recreate historical scores. I can see the symbols I need in the sMUFL symbol set under barlines but there is still apparently no ability to add or edit custom barlines. If this feature request is not in the offing, can someone suggest a workaround? I am experimenting with modifying clefs so that I can get correct placement in the staff, but that causes a whole new set of issues, including the fact that it is also not easily possible to hide barlines.

Any thoughts on when or if this request will be addressed? JW

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@jakeysworld Hopefully Dorico can expand backwards to support more historical engraving. I am still rather unhappy that I can’t set Haydn as per original publications, as he uses double barlines all the time, and he is surely quite mainstream. Ironically, in the other direction, I cant set properly the MSS of my contemporary composer colleague where he uses double barlines extensively.

You can make any type of barline you like in Lilypond. I hope we can see the usual great implementation of a similar feature in Dorico soon.

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FWIW, this is easy in Finale too. Just click Custom and design whatever shape you want. (The Shape Designer editing window is pretty clunky though.)

@jakeysworld Here’s a workaround:

  1. Insert a single thick bar line where you want the double thick bar line (see earlier in the thread)
  2. Add a extra empty measure before that measure and insert a single thick left bar line to the new measure.
  3. Remove the whole measure rest or rests in the new measure.
  4. Bring the two thick bar lines together in Engrave mode.

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Great workaround @John_Ruggero !
I would add:

  1. make sure to edit the bar number (right click Bar Numbers>Add bar number change…) so that the newly created bar doesn’t mess the bar numbering.
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@Christian_R Thank you. And thanks for adding that important information!

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If Finale can do it, then it’s possible. Let’s hope Dorico can do it soon too.

Adding another aspect of this wish, allow the user to specify arbitrary width for barlines in a custom set. Sometimes I need very very thick barlines for example.

We don’t have any concrete plans for a custom barline editor. Barlines are different to many other things drawn by Dorico in that they are almost entirely drawn via primitives rather than using any symbols (with the exception of the dots in repeat barlines). As such, we don’t have any user-facing tools for defining these kinds of items. Building such a thing would be a significant undertaking – a worthwhile one, of course, but not something that can be polished off in a week or two.

As such, it’s much easier for us to define barline types programmatically, and in principle we’re happy to add more. If there’s a set of additional commonly-used barlines that people need, we can certainly consider adding more built-in types.

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@dspreadbury Would it be practical to add a second set of thin single and thin double bar lines that would each have its own line thickness (and gap) controls?

I see no independent control for the thickness of double bar lines at present. If there were, it would take care of the case in the OP as long as normal double bar lines were not needed. If both thin and thick double bar lines were needed, then a second set of normal double bar lines would take care of that.

The example below isn’t an additional barline type, but it is an additional commonly-used style. It’s not something I’ve personally ever wanted to do, but when using the style that shows the barline at the beginning of the system, a double barline at the end of the previous system is often repeated at the start of the next.

That’s not possible now, is it?

Please add a double thick as per Haydn et al, and a VERY thick single barline.
Considering that barlines are pretty fundamental since 1300 or so :slight_smile: , and that there are a wide variety used outside of Common Era music, and in jazz, and modernism, it would be good to have a wider range.

Well, they didn’t really get going until c. 1600. :grin:

Coincidentally, I did just come across this double thick bar today:

However, I’m not entirely sure what purpose it serves…!

We would LOVE the option to use serpent segnos in our work – the characters are defined already in the Smufl character set.

In the end, I don’t actually want to create custom barlines, we’d just like to have these historical symbols available to choose from in the barline set.

It’s true that these symbols are technically “repeat” markers, but they are positioned on the system in the same place as bar lines (e.g. repeat bar lines) go, hence the ask for the ability to make use of these as barlines.

If there is another way to be able to make use of these symbols so that we can visually signal repeating sections that have internal repeats we’d love to hear about it.

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