Global breath marks?

What’s the least painful way to do this?

There could be a quicker way, but because I have assigned a keyboard shortcut, this takes about 10 seconds.
Enter the breath mark on the top staff, select it and repeatedly use Duplicate to Staff Below.
There might possibly be an alternative solution using copy and paste, but I’ll leave that to others to explore.

Yeah, that’s what I’ve been doing.

Annoyingly, if you go back and add mujsic to any of the “empty” bars the breathmark moves.

Which one?
Duplicate to Staff Below, or copy and paste?

I have found that when I used Duplicate to Staff Below, adding notes to the “empty” bars did not move the breath mark. When I used copy and paste and then added notes to the “empty” bars, the breath mark did move.

Duplicate.

That’s because the breath mark has attached itself to the grid at the beginning of the empty bar.

Solution: Paste them into the following (empty) bar and move them back with Alt-left. You can do all the staves at once (so that’s about 5 keystrokes for the entire copy/paste operation).

Enter a breathe on the bottom stave. Ctrl-C. Select the 1st note of the following bar (in the staff above), shift-click the top stave rest. Ctrl-V. Alt-left. Job done!

1 Like

Or show the caret, extend it across all the staves, and then input the breath mark with the popover at exactly the rhythmic position you want (ie the caret position).

1 Like

Whilst officially the correct way, personally I use the holds popover so infrequently (I do miss the tool tips in D4) that I forget it exists and certainly couldn’t recall the correct entry to type.

Also, more generally, is there a reason why, if I have the carat extended, clicking on the panel only enters on the top staff, yet using the popover enters in all selected staves?

Shift-H, comma

You can use one of the caesuras, you don’t need in the project and exchange the symbol to the breath mark.

Yes. Simple if you can remember that a breath is a hold and that the code for it is comma (also, in my world, a pause has always been a pause not a fermata!)

You’re right. In my world, a “point d’orgue” has become a “fer” in Dorico — that’s the first time I discovered some code names could be quite shorter than the real name, by default, in Dorico. Easter eggs. I was so happy then that I posted on the forum for the other users to know, and then we started an eggs hunt :joy:

2 Likes

It’s good to know this option, even for other things.

But I wonder if there’s a reason not to also include the comma mark in the Caesuras group of the Holds and Pauses panel.
Like the example above attests, the comma mark isn’t used only for individual staff “breath” reasons, but is also a tutti “break pause” like a caesura, although shorter than a caesura. (Gould states that it is actually more common than regular caesuras, which I tend to agree.)
As it apears to be a simple thing to address, could it be added there in a future update?