I’m racking my brains how to realise this. But since I’m new to Dorico I thought I’d better ask the experts.
This is what I would like to achieve.
In a piece for choir, which has many small solo parts, at some point, all choir parts tacent. They should have an empty free-time bar, perhaps with a fermate on a rest.
At that point, there are five solo parts, which each have a short phrase to sing. They should pick their own entry time, or perhaps I’ll give the sequence, but not the exact timing. They also pick their own tempo. The only requirement is that these solos must overlap. There is no repeating. As soon as a soloist finishes, he/she is done.
The choir resumes in a regular meter once the soloists are done.
My solution of choice would be to put the five solo phrases in frames or boxes, wich set them apart from the preceding and following bars and make them somehow float in free space. I did something similar in the example (many years ago, not without a bit of cut-and-paste in the pdf), the difference being that in that case, the solo phrases are repeated, hence the arrows.
Have a look at some options here. There’s a white line covering staff lines and a white line with an arrow and two different types of boxes made from lines.
Many thanks, Jesper! This looks very interesting and will probably do the trick. I may get back to you once I have written the notes if I need some further enhancement.
To be honest, it’s too much work in Dorico I think. I would create graphic snippets in Dorico of the staff parts with notes and lyrics, then
import it to Affinity Designer, Adobe Illustrator, or the free Inkscape and assemble everything there.
Wow, that is steep. Thanks for this hint as well. (And for faithfully recreating this snippet in a foreign language. “and float thither” it says, “out of sight”.)
I now wrote the piece and decided to follow your advice, Jesper. So I created the snippets for the solo parts in a separate ‘garbage’ flow. Each one occupies a system of its own (and there’s some rubbish and empty bars between them). A simple pdf editor allowed me to put them in boxes and to create a bit of free space around them.
In the actual flow for the piece, I put the longest solo as a placeholder in each of the five solo parts, to make sure that spacing was not too tight. Then I used my regular pdf editor to cover these parts with frameless white boxes, so that the stage was all set for pasting in the solo snippets.
The only bit still missing is an editor to paste the snippets in. I used to make use of PDFpen, but it has ceased to exist and has been replaced by Nitro-something, which can do a lot of nifty things I don’t need and has a very unattractive pricing scheme.
You suggested Inkscape, Jesper, but this apparently doesn’t work (anymore?) for MacOS. So I’ll probably settle for Affinity Designer. Just to be sure, it would allow to paste a snippet taken from one pdf into another pdf, would it? Many regular pdf editors don’t support this simple cut/paste function for graphical content. PDFpen apparently was rather unique in that it did.
Slightly off-topic perhaps. Let’s call this an external workaround.
Affinity Designer is excellent. You can drag a PDF snippet you created in Dorico into Designer. Or perhaps Affinity Publisher. I know @benwiggy had some
complains about imported PDF:s. Perhaps he will respond.
In a help file on Affinity Designer I read “Text will be rasterized on export” (to pdf format). This makes me a little nervous.
The help files of Affinity Publisher on the other hand state “Placing content allows you to add raster and vector images, as well as Affinity documents, PDFs, and PSDs, to your document’s pages […]” This would seem the right approach, which suggests that Affinity Publisher rather than Designer is the way to go.
Does this make sense? I’m not so familiar with graphic design software.
I don’t think so.
Here’s the export dialog. You can select nothing under rasterize.
(well if you use some blurring fx on some of the text it has to rasterize that part)
But still, Publisher might be better for you. Can’t you download a demo of both and try?
I don’t use those apps very much and mostly to draw stuff so I wish someone else could chime in. Or send me a one-page pdf and I’ll add some snippet from Dorico and send it back to you and you can check for yourself.
Interesting. Many thanks for your efforts, Jesper!
Apparently, I consistently overlooked the free trial options for the Affinity software. I did look for them, since seeing for yourself always works a lot better than relying on documentation.
I’ll try both and report back.
Incidentally, yes, I do need the boxes and occasionally – but not this time –, the arrows as well. But Apple’s free Preview app allows me to draw these. So the only missing bit effectively is pasting in pdf snippets.
I first tried Affinity Designer. Starting out with a pdf of the “garbage” flow with the 5 solo parts, I managed to hide unwanted sections of staff lines and draw boxes around the solo parts, then copy these boxes (in some cases only half of them, if they were too long) across to an imported pdf page of the actual piece.
So far so good. But I can’t seem to be able to export or print the updated page as a pdf again. Apparently, I lost the A4 paper size and the original page has become a background image, which doesn’t show up in the print or export.
Then I tried Affinity Publisher. This allowed me to hide unwanted staff lines and draw boxes around the notes of the 5 solo parts just as well as Designer. But trying to import these boxes, or – worse – half of them, is a bit of a nightmare. They seem to disintegrate into many, many individual frames, not allowing me to select and cut out or copy over an exact rectangle.
Hmm, so I was grappling with the Dorico learning curve and now got two more to deal with. That was a bit too steep for me.
Jesper, I would be really grateful if you could point me in the right direction here. I attach the two relevant pages of the piece (the contents of bar 34 for the soloists still need to be removed, e.g. by pasting a white rectangle over them) as well as the page with the solo parts. How do I end up with two pdf pages with the solo parts pasted in?? Part 2, pp.18-19.pdf (52,5 KB) Part 2 solo parts for pp.18-19.pdf (100,3 KB)
I didn’t say it would be easy. It might be better for you to find some other simpler alternative. In Publisher (or Designer) you can always group things together or lock things in the layer menu. If you remove what you don’t want, then select all, and Layer->lock then you can’t move or select anything by accident.
Then you can draw your boxes, and copy/paste them as you want. Or drag in your snippets from Dorico.
Looked at your files but not sure what you want I’m afraid. Best if you could find someone where you live who can help you.
… which fortunately was now. I probably just needed a fresh look.
Affinity Publisher did the trick, and grouping the disparate elements I wanted to copy over, like you suggested, Jesper. I had to copy the entire boxed phrases, even if I only wanted to paste part of them on one page (and the rest on the next page). So I had to cover the unwanted part of these boxes with a frameless white rectangle.
This is what it now looks like and that is exactly what I wanted to achieve: 17 seconds of freely timed overlapping solo phrases with random entries.
