A truly opaque background for text boxes has been successfully implemented in Dorico-5. This is an immense improvement for me. I do a lot of accompanying of spoken text, writing out musical cues for myself and then improvising behind the actors as I follow along. In previous versions I would have to jump through hoops to make the scores easily readable on stage. Thank you so much.
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This feature is a real boon, but I notice that the dots on repeat signs (and implicit whole rests) are not yet masked. I hope these can be maskable some time in the future. I can work around the rest problem but not the repeat dots.
Thanks.
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Once the text is typed, I must select all of it, both characters and spaces, then choose the background color even if it’s white. I need to switch to Engrave mode to be able to tick the Erase background parameter for the box. For me, the text box now does cover both implicit rests and repeats as well as bar lines or notes or whatever else I’ve tested except for bar numbers and instrument labels.
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There was a thread in the german forum, for covering a system divider. I tried to do it with text frames. Because they start exactly at the frame/page margins, there will be some small “artifacts”. You can solve this with “show borders” and set the border color to white.
It’s also not possible to mask the first “bar line” and the brackets, if the music frame starts at the page margin, because they are placed outside of the margin.
Adding a color in addition to using Erase Background does cover implicit rests and Repeat Dots. Thank you, @Gb7b5 , for this solution.
Alas no, my initial excitement about getting this long awaited feature was premature. In further testing I see that the implicit rests and repeat dots just happened to fall behind actual letters and not behind the empty space which fills out the rectangle. In moving my various test boxes around I’m getting the same problem as @Derrek, the same I’ve had since moving over to Dorico 2. The solution that @Nukkul mentions concerns floating text frames. These are really opaque but they are fixed to the page, not to a given bar which is what I need. So I’m back to manually adding extra spaces to fill out the rectangles which works until I have to make changes in the text I’m accompanying, in which case, the extra spaces have to be erased, the text reflowed, and then new extra spaces added. It’s not ideal but it can be done.
Am I missing something?
Oh sry. I thought Text box = Text frame. My fault.
My mistake. I used “text box” without verifying the manual’s word for it which is actually “text item”.
Thanks for your idea of employing white frame borders on text frames. It will be useful for me.