Cutc time signature along with 3/2

Dear dev team,
I’ve just been asked for help in the french FB dorico page — the OP wanted to reproduce something like

He ended creating a cutc bar with nothing in it, and with a dashed barline with 0 length dashes, that would lead to this :

Just to let you know — but you probably already know — that there is a need for this kind of notation. I could not find a way to achieve it using the Meter popover (I guess cutc - 3/2 would have been convenient…)


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That’s a prolation, surely, and not a time signature in the modern sense. Dorico doesn’t currently have support for those kinds of proto-time signatures, but it’s something that we will hopefully support in future when we can spend time enriching Dorico’s support for early Western music.

Thanks Daniel. As usual, you are perfectly right (I did not know the prolation term)!

I was actually just fiddling with this a day or two ago, because there’s an opera I engraved a while back in Finale that needed C2/4 and C3/4 (for different reasons, but it’s a similar enough marking that I brought it up here on the forum once back when prolation was in discussion - Overriding metric divisions - #12 by snakeeyes021 - Dorico - Steinberg Forums).

I was just curious to see if I would still do it in Finale or if Dorico was now up to snuff, and I’m happy to report that indeed, the entire opera as it was previously engraved would be doable in Dorico (though I might nonetheless change how we indicated what was editorial and not since that involved a lot of circles and ellipses). Funny story, the time signatures required awful workarounds in Finale, which turns out to be almost exactly the same method as the OP you mention used.

Anyways… as long as you don’t need more than two distinct multi-part time signatures like this per document (or more depending on what else is or isn’t in there), I’ve got a method that works. Since music of this time period almost absolutely certainly will not use the 5 or 7 characters in their time signatures, it’s a simple matter of editing the 5 or 7 in the music symbols editor to show cutC3/2. In the editor, you just link the bottom left and the top left of the 3 and 2 characters, respectively, to the baseline right of the cutC character (If you want to edit spacing beyond that, that’s easy enough; just edit the X offset of the 3). Then in the score, do the time signature as 5/2 or 7/2 but don’t show the denominator. Add 6/1 (or whatever time signature one actually needs) to the next measure, hide it, and you’re good to go.

(Upon rereading my last paragraph, it occurs to me that it may benefit from additional clarity. In lieu of additional clarity, here are some pictures :wink: )



Thanks for this, it can be helpful — that was the path I was up to follow when the OP gold me his workaround.