I have been reading up on the intricate workarounds that have been developed for creating staff incipits for early music editions. Because my editions are of 18th century music, my staff incipits are much simpler than most–really just a clef in most cases–and so the workaround I’d like to use is to drop it in as a graphic slice.
In order to do this, I need to increase the horizontal space between the staff label and the staff, BUT ONLY on the first page. I don’t want additional space on the subsequent pages. Can’t figure out a way to do this. I use abbreviated labels on the subsequent pages, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to differentiate the two.
That being said, it could be easier (and safer in terms of spacing) to use the Coda or Ambitus workarounds for your incipits.
The graphic slices you add will not be attached to the staves, but to the page (or the template). So if you later make spacing changes, they will no longer be in the correct position.
Thanks so much, @charles_piano . I’d rejected the space approach because that moves the name but not the part designations (though I could just incorporate those into the instrument names, I suppose).
As for the page-oriented graphic issue, I’d figured it would be the last thing that I do once the score is “photo-ready.” Maybe I need to give the coda approach a try, though.
Glad that old video helped. But as @charles_piano suggests, there are other better methods meanwhile. I added a reply to that thread, with a visual guide and Dorico project example for the cutaways method, and the Ambitus font method:
Thanks again! Based on all your guidance, I think I’ve arrived at the method that I’ll use.
I changed the instrument names to add the incipits directly
This was problematic because I had two horn parts (condensed) that needed clef incipits. So adding the incipits to the instrument names resulted in their placement before the part number (Corno [INCIPIT] II)
It was further problematic because I had one staff whose label requires two lines, so I couldn’t use spaces to make the non-incipit lines line up with the incipit ones.
My ultimate solution was simply to left-justify the staff labels. Unconventional, to be sure, but this solved quite a lot of problems. In addition, I simply didn’t start the corni condensing until the second page. So the name and incipit are in the middle. Also less than ideal, but it will get the job done until there’s a built-in solution.
(And knowing the size of the early music editions community, I can’t imagine this matter is at the top of Steinberg’s to-do list!)
@TroppMusic
From your screenshot: you could decrease the Baseline shift value for the Ambitus chunk of the instrument name (by selecting it first in the Staff label editor)), so the glyph is better aligned vertically with the name and the main staff.
