Is it possible to do a cresc.- - - - poco- - - - a - - - - poco in Dorico using the dynamic popover and panel?
And if so, can one position all the items where one wants them?
I see that a cre- - scen – - do is possible but exact positioning of the elements doesn’t seem to be possible.
If you just type cresc. or cresc... in the popover and set the properties like this:
You’ll get this:
There are these settings in Engraving options that let you change the outlook a bit, but there’s no way AFAIK to exactly determine the position of (say) the poco.
Thanks so much, Charles. That solved my issue.
@Zalde There are many options covered there and Dorico seems to do a good job in positioning the elements, but more control would be nice.
Where I just placed it, one of the poco’s sits over a barline. I erased the background, but wouldn’t normally place it like that. The only way to change it is move the end points. But that isn’t exactly right either. So I may piece it together the way I did originally.
There is a way to obtain some control over the spacing of cresc. poco a poco:
The first system uses the settings given by @charles_piano in post #2 except that Poco a poco is not checked and Suffix is set to “ poco a poco” without the quotes. The remaining systems replace one or more spaces in poco a poco with the sequence space, Unicode no-break space (U+00A0), and space. The second system replaces the space in poco a, the third system replaces the space in a poco, and the last system replaces both spaces in poco a poco.
You’re missing the space before the first poco.
Oh yes, thank you!
Thank you, johnprice. The first part of that worked well as an alternative, once one knows that one must type a space before the first poco.
But no luck with typing unicode into the suffix box. I hold down the option key with unicode hex input active on my Mac, type the first 0 and the cursor disappears from the box and no more typing can proceed. Is there a trick to it? Unicode is terra incognita for me.
Edit: Just figured it out. I typed: space-no break space-space into a Affinity Designer file and copy-pasted it into the suffix box. That worked.
Very interesting work-around that I will play with. Thank you so much, johnprice. Ingenious.
I am also scared sometimes by unicode input 
In my little experiences is that, even if you don’t see the characters being inputted, when you type all what you need, the result will magically appear (but as I said, I have not much knowledge about this…)
Yes, I find unicode a pretty arcane affair. But in this case, I couldn’t type more than one character in the box with the option key down before the cursor vanished and I was not longer “in” the suffix box. Try it yourself. I’m interested in what I am doing wrong.
While conducting more experiments on controlling the spacing of cresc. poco a poco, I learned that the sequence space, no-break space, space could not be used to increase the distance between cresc. and poco. However, I discovered that the ASCII underscore character (U+005F) could be used instead of the no-break space to increase the distance between any words in cresc. poco a poco as well as add dashes at the end of the gradual dynamic:
I will try it, johnkprice. Thank you for your continued experimentation. This sounds very promising. I suspect however that I will not be able to input it directly into Dorico but need to copy it from a word processor for the reason I mentioned earlier.
It should not be necessary to copy and paste the ASCII underscore character. On the US or UK English keyboard, this character is obtained by typing Shift+Hyphen.
Thank you johnkprice. I experimented a bit and found that adding the space/non-breaking space/space combination enlarges the space between any of the items including between the initial cresc. and the poco. However if the combination is added between all of the items, the result is back to the original spacing and there is no net effect. The same results when using multiple combinations. The same number cannot be added to the space between all of the items.
The underscore adds space between any of the items, but does not add “hyphens” to the extension line. So if many underscores are added, a noticeable empty space without results. So this would only be used for fine tuning.
These two resources go a long way toward being able to control the position of all the items. Thank you so much for investigating this!
I did want to ask once again if anyone can input unicode directly into the Suffix box.
Since I’m on Windows and you’re on Mac, I can’t answer this question for you. Sorry.
When I set the Suffix property to _ poco _ _ _ a poco, I get lots of hyphens after the first poco:
If you can’t get a similar result, perhaps this is a difference in behavior between Windows and Mac.
I get lots of hyphens too, but also a gap is created when many underscores are added.
Yes, I have abbreviate checked.
Try again with spaces between the underscores.
