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.
2 Likes
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.
2 Likes
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.
2 Likes
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.
I’m curious about why “erase background” doesn’t actually erase the background, just the staff and measure lines. Not notes, rests, clefs, etc. Is this the intended operation of the feature? Seems to me you’d want to literally erase everything in the background to make the feature useful.
We consider the staff lines and barlines to be part of the “musical background”, and that is the background that we are trying to erase. We know it would be helpful in some circumstances to make it possible to erase different things, and one day we may provide a means of specifying the z-order for items and their background erasures, so that you have greater control.
3 Likes
Thankyou! If this becomes possible one day, it would be very useful for scoring musical theater.
Thanks, that’d be great.
Or maybe a color option for the background like you have in text frames?
I got what I wanted by making things like implicit rests transparent.
You can already set a White background for the (customized) Paragraph Style used in you Text items (menu Library/Paragraph Styles…). Try it with a border activated in the Text item and you will habe a boxed text that hides more things than erase background.
The above is a text item with a style set to have a white opaque background and border using Library/Paragraph Styles.
Below is a text frame with the same white background setting. That’s how I want the text box to look.
Let me know if I’m missing something, but the behavior seems the same even with a background color set in Library/Styles.
I’m not sure I understand the utility having only the staff and measure lines covered by an opaque text box.
1 Like
Hi @Peter_Hamlin,
yes, I forgot to mention a little caveat (I was not clear enough, in my previous post, that you need to activate the border as property instead of activating it in the paragraph style): I found out some times ago that without activating the border in the Paragraph Style that has a white bakground activated, the full bar rests will be hidden. You can then activate the border as property in the properties panel, and doing so the full bar rests are hidden (I am not sure why this discrepancy occurs. @dspreadbury any ideas?* [see video below])
(One thing that will not be hidden with this method are the dots of dotted notes)
Workflow:
Result:
Dorico file example:
test white baground paragraph style (border as property).dorico (501.6 KB)
(*) I made a short video to show this discrepancy (sorry for the New Year noise in the audio):
3 Likes
Yikes! OK, got it!
This really isn’t a good solution for me, though, because the opaqueness is for the text, not the box. So in areas of the box where there is no text, including the padding, items will show through. The example shows the same exact text box which you’d need to carefully place so the rests are under text.
And so for what I want the most practical solution is to make a regular text box with “background erase” and just make all the implicit rests underneath it transparent.
I guess I’d vote for an easier way to create a text box with an opaque background.
I really appreciate your help! I learned a lot about customizing text boxes. I would have never figured out your solution!
@Peter_Hamlin
I use a little trick for such cases: in addition to the method described above, I also write some extra “x” (where you need to hide some rests) and assign the white color background to these “x” to fake the opaqueness of the “empty space” (I know it is not ideal and still requires some strategical positioning of the text item, and possibly substitute the paddings with some additional “x”, and I hope that this will be addressed in future, but meanwhile works somehow ):
-
before the added “x” in the lower line:
-
write the “x”:
-
assign white colour foreground rot them:
-
Result:
Dorico file example:
test white baground paragraph style (border as property)-with added X.dorico (498.8 KB)
1 Like
Sorry to be so late in writing about the fantastic solution you have come up with to solve this problem. Cutaway scores! Instead of my rather ugly workaround, white text on a black background, cutaways make adding spoken text to muscial theater scores a dream to write. In addition, the text now wraps in text frames. Thankyou so much. Brilliant.