Once upon a time, about 14 years ago or so…I was using Overture on a film project…and I made a request to Don, the developer behind Overture and whala…a cool feature appeared for that called “Hollywood lines”. this was in order to deal with what I was schooled to do on film scores at the time, and told that conductors like it…etc… if it wasn’t in the software I would have to draw them with a sharpie, which I actually did on one project, but project #2, using overture…I used the new feature…hollywood lines. Overture is pretty much a dead product now as far as I’m concerned and Dorico is the future…but two questions.
is it possible to easily add these kinds of lines in dorico right now today someday, even if totally manually?
would developers consider adding some feature that might make it relatively easy to do this kind of thing somehow in dorico.
Hi @Dewdman42, these (if really desired!) need to be created manually: you can add them as vertical lines, attached to the first note of the nearest staff of the upper TS (or to a hidden note, with suppressed playback if you don’t have any music near the line start, and then choose the top position, drag the bottom control point down and position the line horizontally, and change the line style in Engrave mode and its Properties panel. [EDIT: but then the bar rest of the hidden notes bars will not be visible…]:
You would need then to make the opacity to 0% for the part where the line originates (with the properties set to Local to affect this only the Part appearance):
if and when the score rearranges for any reason…changing the spacing of the notes from the meter markings…wouldn’t that then screw up the alignment of the line?
Nice to know it’s possible, but given all that is involved I would probably rather pull out a sharpie at the last minute. Hope Dorico team will consider this as a valuable addition to Dorico.
Pardon my French! No criticism whatsoever. As a part-time linguist, I love to see how spoken expressions wander from one language to another. Quite OT, sorry.
Drawing the line with a sharpie is actually considerably faster than the manual workaround suggested. To be honest I would either use a sharpie or just forget the line as a lot of people seem to do these days, but I do know for a fact that the lines are appreciated by conductors when working with click. Anyway, appreciate the manual workaround suggestion, I don’t mean to criticize that…but… Hope Steinberg is listening…a lot of people do use oversized meters, with hiding them on certain staves and what not…specifically for this use case…and…with lines it would be even better. A built in function to do this, and have it all line up and avoid collisions and everything else…would be very beneficial for anyone producing scores intended for conductors who are conducting to a click track in particular, etc… its just a pragamatic thing, I guess maybe in the past people did the lines more often…you can see a lot of old scores them with them hand drawn…it is what it is. Overture provided ability for the software to do it…and it was helpful.
or another possible hack I can think of would be to come up with a special font for meters…which includes lines above and below… Or another potential change would be the ability to attach vertical lines to meter marks…so if the meter moves, the line moves too.
(my examples was only a little exercise on the possible workarounds…but indeed is very suboptimal)