I don’t know if this has been discussed in the past (it most likely has), but…
(sorry, I had forgotten I posted to two different places. here’s the link to the Facebook group discussion: Redirecting...)
It would be nice if one could insert text boxes (with or without borders) that are taken into consideration with vertical and horizontal scaling.
I have two specific example:
a symphony where each movement is prefaced by a short text which only appears in the score. This means that the first page of each movement has to move the music down ever so slightly to leave room for the text in question. This text does NOT appear in parts.
This text would also have to be free of the actual music. However, since new text appears at the start of every subsequent movement, with different length of text each time, and slightly different formatting, it becomes a pain to have to insert the text blocks in the Engraving pages section.
The very first page of the score has the grand title, the composer, year of composition, subtitle, opus number, etc… while the subsequent movements only have the movement titles (same font style as the “subtitle” on the first page).
a chamber work with narrator, the narrated text MUST appear in both score and parts, since the musicians have repeated vamps and carefully-timed musical cues to play under the spoken text.
In this case, both horizontal and vertical spacing need to be taken into account as the text sometimes overlaps across several measures, and other times, it should only appear over a single measure.
This means there would need to be two different types of spacing, one that limits within a set number of measures, and one that is freer and overlaps across multiple measures (although, a simple function like telling it how many measures the text covers could work as well).
You might use flow headings for this. Just like page templates, you can create new flow headings, name them and insert flow heading changes.
I do use them in operetta works, where it is important for the conductor to have the last two or three cues from the dialog before the music starts.
Okay, I’m not sure I understand how to do that.
Flow headings are set in the file information page?
Would “flow heading changes” be like inserting page breaks and stuff like that? inserting signposts?
How about for the chamber piece example? The text there doesn’t appear only on the 1st page, it runs throughout the work at different places, different lengths, different sizes of text block.
Flow headings are customizable in engrave mode below the page templates and above the page template sets. You can edit them with text/music frames just like page templates.
While using custom flow headings can, for the present, solve some of Michel’s situations, I know that adding (down the road) such flexibility as he suggest would be enormously valuable for theater music as well.
Flow headings take a very natural place at the beginning of a flow, and you can edit, format… exactly as you wish. There’s nothing in the examples you posted that cannot be done using custom flow headings. Hence my two answers. Of course, if you need to show the text somewhere else, it’s not the appropriate tool anymore!
yeah, I realized after posting that the excerpt from the quintet does not give a good idea of how the text is used in that piece.
It shows up in the score on more or less every other page, as the story advances and the narrator tells the story, sometimes to music, sometimes to a measure of un-timed rest.
This text must appear in all the parts so that the musicians know what to expect, however, it must only appear above the top staff of the score.
I’ve been testing the System Text function, and it looks like that will work perfectly well for the quintet and its incorporated narration.
For the symphony, well, I think I’ll have to be making every first page of a movement/flow slightly differently, inserting a text frame, adjusting the the music frame accordingly slightly lower down on the page.
I try to put the text into the Project Info > Other Information for the given flow and then apply an appropriate custom Flow Header Template for the paragraph length.
Granted a text frame that would automatically expand to contain the text would be ideal (as would Rich Text capability), but I do not minimize the programming demands that would entail.
