Hi,
If there isn’t a way to do this, I’d like to request a Filter-> Bar Numbers option. It’s very time consuming to select each number one by one, because using the lasso usually selects other stuff in between the bar numbers.
It could also be beneficial to have an option so that the bar numbers “stay” in one position instead of jumping around ties or lines. See attached picture.
Best,
Juan
There is already an option for this, on the Bar Numbers page of Layout Options: ‘Align bar numbers across width of system’.
It doesn’t work, Daniel. If you select one bar number and nudge it, the others on the system don’t. I’ve just tried.
As far as I can tell, the “align bar numbers across width of system” just looks for collisions, and makes all the bar numbers the same offset on that system.
It would be helpful if “Select More” could apply to bar numbers as well. It doesn’t, currently.
Leo, it’s not supposed to work like that: there’s no option for anything in Dorico to make the automatic positioning of a bunch of non-edited items match the position of something you’ve nudged. The ‘Align bar numbers across width of system’ option certainly does work: it ensures that all bar numbers are at the same vertical position across the width of the system by default.
Daniel, I read the OP and I viewed the attached image. My reading of it is that the OP wants to be able to nudge all of the bar numbers on a system simultaneously. He/she/they is/are not suggesting that individual bar numbers are jumping around, rather that whole systems worth of bar numbers are moving together, by default. It was with that interpretation in mind that I argued that the “‘Align bar numbers across width of system’.” doesn’t work.
Daniel, would it be possible to include “Select More” to apply to bar numbers in a future update? That would be the easiest fix here, at least from the user’s perspective. No idea about the programming involved.
It would also keep from further expanding the already intimidating filter list…
Align bar numbers across width of system is very useful, but being able to select them at once would be time saving, specially when there are many parts and songs involved.
Attached is the look I’m going for. When there’s no ties or lines, it looks great, but when there is something in the way, the bar numbers move way out of the way, even when aligned.
Bar numbers are not real items, so it’s complicated to select them. Nothing’s impossible, of course, but it’s not simply a matter of adding another branch to the existing Select More code.
It’s quite common in MT (Finale?) templates to have bar numbers that don’t ever try to avoid collisions. Presumably this is applicable to other genres too. For example like this:
At the danger of making assumptions and telling developers what to do, I wonder if, rather than making it possible to select multiple bar numbers in order to quickly fight the software’s collision avoidance, it might be worth having a Layout Option that just tells Dorico to put bar numbers exactly x units above/below the staff? It would be up to the user to get the final tweaking right, but in the case of the OP, certainly, it would result in significantly less manual labour. I daresay it wouldn’t be easy to implement, but it might be easier than implementing a “select more” function for rules-generated items.
I have another situation in which being able to filter for bar numbers would be desirable:
I’m finishing up a wind quintet, and for the individual parts, the other four instruments are represented as a reduction: 2 instruments per staff, no dynamics, articulations, slurs, text etc., and 60% staff size. The instruments, as much as possible in this configuration, are kept in score order.
This means that, except for the flute, the top staff in each part is a 60%-sized staff. Which means that all the text attached to it is scaled down too (including measure numbers). I manually scaled up each rehearsal letter and tempo marking etc. to 167% to compensate (which I now realize I could have filtered for, but didn’t think of at the time—I’m new to Dorico). But I’m really not sure I’m up to doing the same for every measure number (even given that I’m only using them at the beginnings of systems).
If I could filter for bar numbers, this would be trivial to address. As it is, I have to choose between doing exactly the kind of repetitive labor software is supposed to help people avoid, or leaving the formatting in a state that is clearly not what it should be.
Set the font for bar numbers to be absolute rather than relative. You should be able to do it for the whole project in under 10 clicks.
This goes as a good rule for working with Dorico: assume that there is a global way; you will save hours!
Wonderful! Thanks!
I should have asked about alternative ways to address my issue. My bad. Thanks again.
…and note that there are two different bar number fonts: one for scores and one for parts. Dependent on your Layout Options your parts may actually be using the Bar Numbers (Score) font style; if so you should probably change them over to Bar Numbers (Parts) in order to be able to control the size in the parts separately.
So I’m going to Engrave Mode —> Engrave —> Font Styles and changing from Staff Relative to Absolute, but am not seeing any change.
I’m looking at the layout I want to change (which is actually “full score” because so far I’ve found it easier to create the form of reduction I want this way, in a separate document). So maybe this has something to do with score vs. parts fonts, but I don’t see any indication of which I’m working with.
They’re Paragraph Styles rather than Font Styles - sorry! Bar number paragraph styles
So I’m supposed to select some style other than “Bar numbers (score)” or “Bar numbers (parts)” for the bar numbers paragraph style? I don’t see anything about relative vs. absolute here.
In Engrave > Paragraph Styles, select the Bar Numbers (Score) paragraph style in the left panel, then set the Size to something massive, then set the switch just to the right of that to Absolute.
Then click OK.
Ok, it’s working now! Thanks. 
The first thing I tried was following the link you sent, then following the first link at the bottom, “Changing the bar number paragraph style used in layouts,” which didn’t have the relevant information. But if I’d followed the second link, “Paragraph Styles dialog,” (where you pointed me just now), I would have seen the area that made the difference.
A bit of meta that is maybe not worth anyone’s time: So far, I haven’t found much that I want to do that Dorico can’t do. I bought it exactly because it’s built from scratch after decades of outdated data structures’ limitation became evident in relation to actual practice.
And as a user, it may be reasonable for me to assume that there’s a good way to do everything, at this point. But it is really hard, as a user of any software, to know when you’re missing something, and the software does what it’s supposed to, vs. you’re in one of those situation’s that everyone’s run into wherein you have a beloved piece of software that you’ve used for years/decades and that you know inside and out and that you know has limitations that you’ve just learned to live with. I think Dorico aspires to transcend this situation, and maybe it will.
That being said (which is really most of it), for all of Dorico’s flexibility (and maybe largely because of it), all of it’s internally-consistent logic of organization is, I don’t think, always that intuitively accessible to the user. My confusion about the menus and manual here are sort of a case in point re: the terminology, the repetition of similar menus. Maybe all of that is inevitable due to Dorico’s comprehensiveness and flexibility, but it is confusing to have a bar numbers issues, find the bar numbers area of some sort of preferences, and then discover that there are maybe several other places wherein one is expected to address their issues with bar numbers. Maybe keeping that in mind will make me less pointlessly confident that I’ve exhausted my options, though. 
And thanks again for your awesome, prompt help!
I’m glad you’re on the right track now. For what it’s worth I agree with you about rehearsal marks and, for that matter, tempo changes: to the best of my knowledge there isn’t a good way of handling these when the staff size varies from layout to layout. Absolute font sizes are a step in the right direction, but I’m hoping for more flexibility in future.