Hide noteheads in Dorico

I’m sorry, I’ve read the manual Daniel has mentioned and couldn’t figure out how to create an “invisible” (white) note-head in the Engrave > Notehead Sets dialog. I cannot find color properties there. Can anyone explain me what to do please? And I also join Paolo’s request to implement invisible noteheads to a future release. Thank you!

Can’t one just create a new notehead set (not from a selection) and then double-click and erase the one notehead that’s there? The name of this notehead set will be available in the Noteheads contextual menu and can be used to replace a single notehead or an entire selection of noteheads.

It’s advisable to use ~3 text spaces rather than leaving the notehead entirely empty. Selection of notes in Write mode depends on there being some sort of notehead to select -using text spaces makes this possible.

(Thank you Claude, who pointed this out here: Drawing note heads - #14 by claude_g_lapalme - Dorico - Steinberg Forums)

That’s actually quite easy, thank you!

There’s another way to accomplish invisible noteheads (and some other objects):
In the properties panel, turn on the “color” button and click on the color chooser, then reduce opacity to zero.

My experience with changing the opacity (I assume this is the Alpha Channel) to zero, is that when you convert your score to pdf, there are white dots where the notehead is located. Using Dorico 3.5 pro.

You need to export your PDFs as Color rather than Mono.

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you are a legend. they will write songs about you.

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Sorry to resurrect this old thread, but the comment about creating your own invisible notehead has me baffled. @pianoleo (and @claude_g_lapalme in another thread) recommends that we add 3 spaces to our custom notehead in order to make it selectable. I definitely see the need for this, but I can’t make it work well.

I understand how to create a notehead and set it to use one or more text characters. (And — with much head-scratching — I now know how to avoid altering the default black notehead.) If I create a new notehead, delete the existing black notehead glyph (U+E0A4), and then add text containing 3 spaces (0x20) using font.defaulttext, the graphic in the main part of the display looks promising, with three orange squares indicating my three space characters.

But after I assign this new notehead to a quarter note in the score, I can select it with the mouse only if I click right on the top of the stem, in an area 1-2 pixels square. I also can select it by clicking a note on either side and using the left/right arrow keys. In either case, no highlighting of the invisible notehead appears. It looks like Dorico highlights only the black pixels of a notehead glyph, as it does for normal noteheads, but my 3-space notehead has no black pixels. Should I expect highlighting in this case?

How is this working for others who have tried it? I’m coming from other notation programs that support invisible (hidden) noteheads natively, including a highlighted rectangle to show selection, so that’s what I’m expecting.

I’m using Dorico 3.5.12 on a Mac.

Thanks,
John

Using spaces to do this job is certainly not what we would consider the ideal solution, which is why it’s not documented by us in the manual, and nor is it recommended by us – we know there’s a need for this, but we’ve not as yet had a chance to implement a proper solution.

I think that for the most part it might be preferable to simply make the notehead transparent using the Colour property, but it does mean of course that you need to select all the notes that need to be rendered invisible and colour them manually, plus it has implications for final output (you can’t use Mono when exporting graphics, for example, if you have fully transparent noteheads).

Thank you, Daniel. I’ve since realized that using the Color dialog to make the notehead opacity zero is the better solution, because then you can at least select the object and even see it when it’s part of a selection. One downside might be that opacity does not affect the dot of a dotted note.

One would hope for a more semantic implementation of this, but it seems hard to anticipate all the possible uses of head-less stems. At least for some of these uses, perhaps “invisible head” is as semantic as it gets.

I realized after posting that clicking on any part of a stem selects the note, regardless of whether it has an “invisible” head.

John

Hi Marc, how is it possible to copy an arrowhead from the page you cited the link to? I did not succeed.

Just as Marc said, for that character, you have to change the text type to “music text” from the little drop down at the top of the shift+X text editor. That said, there is in-built support for arrows as of 3.5 via the lines panel on the right.

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I know that Dorico 3.5 allows the creation of lines with arrows. However, what interests me in Marc’s post is the possibility of inserting a glyph in the text frame. I can’t do this even though the process works perfectly in a word processor. Here is how I proceeded to obtain a rest with a value of a quarter note (U + E4E5):

  • I select a note and I type Shift + X
  • Music text character style
  • I enter “E4E5” then I type alt + X
    The code does not turn into silence. Have I made a mistake?

If you create the glyph using Bravura Text in a word processor, you can copy and paste it into Shift-X text.

Hi!
I use unicode a lot, but I have never been able to input unicode for glyphs in Dorico. If you find a glyph you want to use in the Smufl page, copy it and paste it into Dorico, after having chosen music text in the text editor, as Romano has written. It does work flawlessly like that.

It’s perfect. I did not understand the procedure. I just did it again successfully. Thank you for your reply.

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I have recently hit a spot needing hided note head and did the color trick. Does using the alpha channel degrade printing quality? It is fine to export to PDF. But I notice when printing places with transparent elements are blurred. And I found out the possible reason by virtually printing to pdf with Acrobat. Pixels in lower resolution show up in the area of transparent element while other places are font vectors . Is there a way to avoid this?

I would suggest scaling the notehead down to 1% size rather than making it transparent.

Note that Dorico 4.3 has added the hide notehead property in Engrave mode. Very nice.

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