Feature request: bar repeats

Dorico
1

Often when writing I need to see the music that will eventually be hidden by bar repeats. This may be to check harmonies or it may be I just don’t realize that a passage would be better notated with bar repeats while I’m still in the process of writing. It would be great if there could be a properties toggle to allow bar repeats to work in two ways, one that hides all inputted music and one that shows any music.

I think most of the time, I would want it to hide all existing music, so maybe a default setting in Preferences could be added to support which setting the user would want by default. There are plenty of times I would want it to show music too, especially when writing drum parts that need to see the rhythmic cues like this:

As of now having to delete all existing music before adding the bar repeats is an additional step I’d like to be able to avoid. Especially because the measures just deleted do not stay selected (selection goes to last entry before deleted section) so I have to select the music, delete it, then re-select that region again to apply bar repeats. Simply just allowing the user to select the region where they want bar repeats and applying them would be a pretty decent time saver.

Additionally, I know these following requests have been mentioned before, but allowing the user to apply bar repeats to multiple staves at once would definitely save time. Also, erasing the background behind the “2” in a 2 bar repeat is a much cleaner look. I suppose there could be a preferences setting for anyone that wants to keep the collision. The current workaround with a non-breaking space Shift-X text is also an additional step I’d like to be able to avoid:

Thanks for considering!

2

I second this, and I would like to add that the setting “hide this bar/these bars under bar repeat signs” should be independent between layouts, so that I can (for example) have bar repeats in the parts but not in the full score.

There are some other aspects that make this problem a bit tricky, though. For example, what if I go and “hide” a bar that isn’t actually a repetition of the previous bar? An approach to this could be that we don’t actually write the music for the repeated bar first and then hide it, but that the bar repeat feature can toggle between “show bar repeat sign” vs. “show a copy of the music”. In this case, however, it’s hard to tell what exactly needs to be repeated (tempo/dynamic markings? Maybe, if they change during the bar, maybe not…). So I guess this is not a simple problem to solve.

3

A potential problem with this way of doing things is that, if the music (rather than repeat sign) appears in a layout, we’d still need the flexibility to adjust note spacing, for instance. or the shapes of slurs, or the positioning of articulations (particularly if there are varying dynamics in close proximity). In Dorico parlance: even if the music in a repeat bar is a duplicate of a previous bar, it still needs its own properties.

4

If the hide existing music toggle was selected, then I would vote for having the bar repeat override any existing music. That way when writing you could easily experiment with other ideas, and quickly go back to just having repeated music in that spot simply by applying the bar repeat.