First of all, something more general: I use Dorico for two different purposes — on the one hand for composing large orchestral works, and on the other for creating worksheets for (theory) classes. For the former, Dorico is truly brilliant — not to say a miracle. I switched from Finale, and the difference between the two is so vast that it is hard to imagine unless you have experienced it yourself.
Unfortunately, it seems to me that the developers of Dorico have paid much less attention — one might even say hardly any — to my second use case. For example, making individual bars appear empty, e.g., for fill-in-the-blank exercises, is cumbersome and only works to a limited extent. (Scaling something down to 1%, for instance, still leaves the element visible as a kind of speck, so you have to resort to ending voices, etc.)
Now, for example, I would like to design a worksheet with three sixteen-bar minuets, each with four bars of melody provided and the rest empty bars. For this purpose, I would simply like all bars to be exactly the same length. In the second minuet, students should not have less space available for bars 5–8 than in the first minuet just because the theme in bars 1–4 takes up more space due to its note values. As far as I can see, there is no simple setting that would assign the same width to all bars. Or have I overlooked something?
As general feedback to the developers: It would be great if you could give even more consideration to worksheet creation as a use case in the future.
Sure, I’ve already figured that out as well. But maybe I only want empty measures for one phrase, and full-bar rests in the next? Then you quickly run into the limits of the function again.
Chiming in here. Dorico and other contemporary engraving programs are just not set up to make equal bars. There are workarounds, but all ultimately unsatisfactory. They are strongly oriented around the rules of fine copper engraving, and for music of the Common Era Period. If you read the essay in Lilypond they go to some length to point out how good engraving down the page makes the barlines offset so they are NOT all in the same position, as it is easier to find your position in the page, especially in repetitive or dense scores. [That essay is well worth reading.] (Not sure if Dorico does this subtlety - but take a look at a Henle score.).
I work with a contemporary composer who insists his bars be 3cm long no matter what is in them. Drives me nuts, because you cannot specify a width, let alone equal widths.
So it’s the fundamental philosophy of these programs to not do what we want in this case. What I have wanted for a long time is an option to say ‘don’t do sophisticated super fine traditional engraving layout Mr Layout Engine,. just let me have equal width or fixed length bars. I feel this is a common and perfectly valid use case. And thanks for the rests but make them blank. Not all music is symphonic grand scores. And so many people use Dorico for teaching it is a shame it can’t be provided.
Now it’s somewhat heretical to mention this here, but there are techniques in Lilypond to achieve exactly equal width blank bars with only a few lines of code. That may be a better tool for your purposes (sorry, I try to refrain from bringing up Lilypond in the Dorico forum, but in this case it is a better tool.)
This is closely related, and you can see how short the code can be:
