How to hide a barline?

[Maximvs]

@Lillie_Harris

That’s the best way to end a flow without a barline. If you don’t want any barlines at all throughout the flow, you can input an open time signature or indeed no time signature at all. You would then need to handle beaming/note grouping manually.

Thanks a lot Lillie for your kind and quick reply and for the updated link, much appreciated…

Best regards,

Max

[Rob_KB]

That’s brilliant - I’m so glad I found this thread, as this procedure makes adding the vocal ranges so easy. I’d been doctoring PDFs in Acrobat prior to this! I’ve been asking for invisible barlines for ages, but no luck yet!

[Romanos]

Oldie but a goodie. Hopefully we will get genuine hidden barlines in due course. They have legitimate uses, imho.

[gratkowski]

I still don’t know how to hide barlines. I have often complex rhythms with beamed notes. Changing the beaming/note grouping in the open meter manually is insanely time consuming. Even forcing the durations and then deleting the barline didn’t work

[dspreadbury]

You can’t hide barlines, but you can delete them. Deleting a barline lenghtens the previous bar to accommodate the additional length of the bar following the barline.

If you’re writing open meter music, you’d be advised to actually write it that way, rather than writing it in a specific meter and relying on the automatic note and beam grouping for that meter, and then deleting all the barlines, as of course the beat grouping for an open time signature won’t match.

If you want to give the appearance of a hidden barline without deleting a barline, the best you can do is to change the engraving options for the gap between dashes in a dashed barline to something bigger than 4 spaces, then create dashed barlines at those barline positions.

[Dufftrio]

I’m new to Dorico, using Elements. Just started today, writing a basic lead sheet. Somehow I have managed to delete all of the barlines. Is it possible to add them back in, turn them back on (If I turned them off!) Or am I stuck having to redo this lead sheet? Thanks! Jeff

[DanielMuzMurray]

Welcome to the forum @Dufftrio.

Have you tried reinputting the time signature at the beginning?

[Dufftrio]

I haven’t. Let me try that real fast

[DanielMuzMurray]

Or, I think if you have Signposts switched on that you might be able to see a bar line change and just click and delete.

[Dufftrio]

I think you’re a genius and a lifesaver!!! That appears to have fixed it!

I’m migrating over from Finale and needless to say, everything is all new! Thank you!!

Jeff

[dan_kreider]

Welcome. Pro tip from a fellow Finale convert: make sure to read the basic documentation, watch the intro videos, and ask lots of questions early. Don’t get stuck in a rabbit hole. Dorico is 100% different! But I switched 4 1/2 years ago and never regretted it.

[Dufftrio]

Thanks! I’ve been scrolling thru the tutorials, plus I have a subscription to groove3 which has an entire series of video tutorials. Literally today is the first day I’ve used it. Of course, I’m trying to get this job done for a client, so the temptation to jump in is great! Friends who have switched to Dorico from Finale tell me I’ll love it once I learn it!