hide cautionary clefs, keys and time signature

@John_Ruggero yes, it could be done by making a solo track. One thing is that Dorico’s divisi function is specifically designed to split a section into a few staves including solo. I wish I could still do it in this way to avoid other restrictions that Dorico might not offer a way to get around.

One example is the staff label. As far as I know the only way to make the staff label as it’s shown (Vc. split into 4 soli and gli altri with proper alignment and bracketing) is by using divisi. Dorico doesn’t offer flexibility to customize staff label hierarchy.

@Janus Unfortunately, shift divisi point earlier doesn’t make the cautionary clef disappear. as dorico still thinks I have a clef change at the beginning of a system.

I had wondered about the labeling. I hope someone comes up with a solution for you. Is there such a thing as masking in Dorico? If all else fails you could apply an overlay with staff lines on it or take the final PDF into a drawing program. So many restrictions!
Speaking of which, I can’t correct a missing word in my last post for some reason and it’s only a day old.

I believe the reason why you cannot edit your existing posts after a period of time is because of your “trust level” here on the forum. As you continue to spend time on the forum, reading and replying to threads, your trust level will increase, and that will grant you additional privileges, including being able to edit your own posts for a longer period of time.

In the meantime, I’ve taken a stab at which word you omitted and have edited your post for you, using my moderation super-powers.

Right on, Daniel, and thank you. Your super-powers are indeed excellent.

I’ve been reading and commenting for years but clearly have more work to do.

Hi Daniel. I found this thread, because I was also running into the problem of not being able to hide cautionary clef changes. Maybe I can provide a valid use case with my scenario: The genre I’m usually working in is pop and jazz. I mostly write sheets. The players/bands/clients usually appreciate it when the sheets are as short as possible (i.e. 2 pages) but to have as much information in them as possible. This information might be rhythmical “kicks” for the drums as well as bass notes and guitar voicing top lines etc… and all that in the same staff. So I find myself changing clefs for just 2 bars to indicate a bass part, and then changing back to indicate some guide notes for the guitarist. It is absolutely not common to have a clef change indication at the end of a staff on a system break. Since those kind of sheets can get very crowded very easily, I’d be happy to just “make the clef invisible” instead of having to start flows every couple of bars. In my cases anything that is not necessary and can be removed, provides more clarity and a nicer, better readable sheet.

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Thanks for taking the time to explain your use case, Chris.

So I understand that you refuse to implement a simple solution, but is there at least a way to customize the size and appearance of cautionary time signatures in general? Because this

example3

is ridiculous…

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No, at the moment there’s no way to change the appearance of cautionary time signatures independently of other time signatures.

Hello Chris,
you can hide cautionary clefs if you select it and set the user defined scaling to 1 (maybe not the correct term. In german it is benutzerdefinierte Skalierung). Now it’s “hidden”. This method will only hide the cautionary clef and not the main clef (at least in my version of dorico). Maybe you need to adjust the note spacing. But that is quickly done in edit mode.

Hi Musikwissenschaftler and thanks for the feedback. What you describe is my exact workaround :slight_smile:
Although, technically, the clef is not hidden but very, very tiny so that you don’t see it unless you zoom in extremely. And you have to do it for every clef separately… but yes, it does the job for now.

Ah okay, I must have missed that you already found a way. But since so many here ask that, maybe it helps someone else.

I would really benefit from being able to hide the cautionary time signatures. Is it possible to add that in the future?

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This is one of the most asked for features… The team knows, it will come in due time.

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Obviously people need to.

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Solved in 5.1 :pray: :pray:

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Hiya,

I found this thread that started way back in 2017, and the latest update is that it’s conceivable that the ability to hide/show cautionary time signature/key signature/clef might be in the 5.1 version of Dorico? Can you confirm whether this is something that is actually on the implementation list for that update?

Our use case is in reproducing historical handwritten scores, and in particular to reproduce rubato vocal parts that have odd meters. If I’m understanding the discussion above, I would have to potentially create a new flow for every one or two measures with some of our items. Is that correct? Do you provide the ability to have flows begin in the middle of systems? If not, then it would appear that we cannot use Dorico to engrave those pieces.

It pains me that after having our entire team invest in Dorico for our project on the promise the Dorico would do the things we knew from other programs better, that we may be forced to use MuseScore for a substantial number of items because it (apparently) readily facilitates this kind of flexibility with the construction of beats in bars and hiding/showing cautionaries. Muse score also has a new MEI export plugin that seems very promising for another part of our project but that’s another discussion.

Of course the problem there is that we lose visual consistency with the scores and the graphic export isn’t nearly as refined as what is possible with Dorico. I have no idea how we will square that circle.

Can you give an update on this question? It’s been 8 years of people requesting this core functionality that would allow users to visually engrave scores the way they want to.

Thanks, JW

The reply before yours, from @MarcLarcher, says as much.

Does this answer your question?

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I think you should start a new thread, showing exactly what it is you’re trying to achieve.
Cautionary time sigs don’t appear in the middle of a system, so I don’t know why you’re suggesting that you would need to create a new flow to avoid a cautionary in the middle of a system.

It sounds like you just want to hide time sigs in the middle of a system, which Dorico has been able to do for years.

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Thanks benwiggy,

Great news. I was working on a project recently where there is a time signature change essentially at every section of the tune (dance set, quadrilles), and we were trying to lay it out in slices to compare between versions and I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to hide the cautionary time signature at the end of a system (now I know why) and extrapolated it to not being able to hide time signatures mid-system. Thank you for the correction. JW