Custom lines, holds on empty staves, and resizing measures

Hi folks! I’m a new Dorico user - I’m enjoying the program so far, but there are a couple of things I’m wondering about. I’d be interested to hear workarounds for these particular issues, and of course, I’d love to hear from Daniel about proper implementation (or if I’m missing something).

  1. Custom lines. I need to be able to create a line to the effect of “piu vib.----->molto vib.----->senza vib.” on a violin part. Right now, as far as I can tell, the only way to do so is by faking it up in text, and then the spacing is wrong in the part. Because I can’t create a line of text that appears only in the score and not the part (though it seems I can do vice-versa with the “opacity” hack), I’m stuck.

  2. Holds on empty staves. When I place a caesura on every staff in a score (for consistency between parts), the otherwise-empty ones should continue to hide in the full score, but Dorico sees the caesura as data and doesn’t hide the staff. Is there a manual “hide staff” switch I’m missing?

  3. Manual resizing of measures. I’m currently orchestrating a score with some uncharacteristically-long tempo markings, and without being able to resize multirests in the parts, I’m ending up with a crash between the tempo mark and the rehearsal mark in the next section. The rehearsal mark now has to live above the tempo text, which is ugly - I’d rather just make the multirest the size of the text.

(I’m also eager for cues and piano pedaling implementation, but I’m sure those will come!)

Best,
Jon

  1. We do plan to implement lines (with and without arrowheads) to join a succession of playing techniques together, as you suggest.

  2. As we discussed on Twitter, I can’t reproduce this problem, so you should attach your project or a simple minimal case that reproduces the problem here so that I can take a look.

  3. We are working on features for editing rhythmic spacing at the moment, which will allow you to move barlines, including (I would hope) those at the ends of multirests.

Thanks! I’ll send you the project as soon as I get a spare moment.

One more question: is there a way to create a “dotted quarter = quarter” tempo marking? I can’t find it.

As far as I know, that has not yet been implemented. You can fake it with text.