Multirest Finale - Dorico

Please, like this in Dorico

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Can you show where this exists in published literature?

The development team is more likely to consider adding options if they have a precedent in existing publications.

Personally I’ve never seen that before and don’t like the look of it, but that’s just my opinion.

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We had a thread about this just a few days ago.

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I did this in finale, I use it for better order

Great, what was the idea in the end?

The fact that Finale does something isn’t compelling enough reason for Dorico to do it (I can’t speak for the development team, but that’s my perspective). There needs to be a compelling reason.

Finale allows its users to do all sorts of things. Some of these are great, some are quirky and wrong.

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I didn’t find the thread yet, but there was some workaround involved.m, and at the end it didn’t look all that pretty.

The thread is here. Daniel’s response is post #9.

The Japanese half-in-the-staff style has been requested before as well.

Since the multirest number is a font style rather than a paragraph style, it cannot white-out the background (if indeed it is in front of the H-bar, but behind the staff lines).

Thanks Mark,
(no wonder I didn’t find it - was searching for bars instead if measures…)

Well, to each his own, but I thought by the end it was looking pretty decent! But OK.

For what it’s worth, this might not be very common in published scores, however: it’s a system that is not entirely rare in some jazz charts where the measure-rest notation is used to designate long passages of a single chord in improvised sections. I don’t typically use this myself, but have on occasion. It is also apparently easy to do in Lilypond, and recently read a thread about it on one of those forums.

I like the idea because it frees up a bunch of clutter above the staff so that there’s room for things like rehearsal and tempo marks. And while it’s true that Dorico should not have to chase every user’s whim, it IS already possible do this individually in Dorico, so there must be some use for it; and since it’s possible to do it individually, it would be a nice feature to be able to do so globally. If there’s a setting to adjust the number vertical placement, I don’t see why it shouldn’t allow us as users to determine whether or not we want the number inside or outside of the staff. I know, it’s maybe a lot more complicated on the coding end, and I don’t mean to make it sound like it might be easy.

On a related note, I’m still waiting for the time when I can put the tuplet numbers right against the beam, even if inside the staff, as illustrated in Kurt Stone’s book.

By the way, my approach is the following. I use these engraving options settings for the multibar rests:


This sets up the H bar to hide the long horizontal line and replace it with long, think “vertical strokes”. I then select all of the multibar rests in engrave mode and adjust their position in the properties panel. The amount to adjust will depend upon the font you use. But you do have to CMD-select each of them individually becuase Dorico will not let you select-more these things.


this is Dorico

Sorry, but I don’t agree with that philosophy. For me the ideal music notation software would allow the user to do whatever they want to do, no matter how quirky someone else thought it might be. That’s how music notation evolves.

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I’m speculating, of course, but I doubt you can have all the power of a semantic, user-chosen-rule-based program like Dorico and simultaneously do anything you want. The two approaches are at odds.

I think Dorico is moving towards more and more options with every update, and that was probably the plan all along. But it’ll never be Score.

I’ll take the former approach, with its limitations and all.

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Being kind of a nerd, I’ve sometimes gone to bed thinking about this. Are the two approaches really non-overlapping magisteria? It would seem that they are, except that the lines tool is not semantic (hence the lack of popover for them), and yet lines were developed - and beautifully so. So there are situations where Dorico is not completely semantic, and the foreseen development of graphical tools will likely contains some non-semantic aspects as well.

In the end, when something in Dorico has - at its base - a musical meaning, the approach of the software is to treat semantically and to treat everything else as an exception. This is not going to change or Dorico will no longer be Dorico. However, what we have seen after 1.0 was released, is more and more ways of creating exceptions, and that has indeed made Dorico more flexible. The danger is going too far in that direction and make it a mess of options, but I find the number of options manageable myself at this time. This of course doesn’t mean that there is no room for more, and that we can’t have dreams! But hey: programmers dream too, and I’m sure they have more surprises in store that are driven by their dreams and those of users who post here.

Adobe Illustrator will give you all the flexibility that hand engravers had! As soon as we start to say “we want you to help us space out the notes; and draw the slurs”, then we are adding rules and constraints. Most of the time, those are helpful. But the real problem with notation is all the exceptions to the rule.

We now have computers that correct our spelling, and our grammar; even rewriting for style. How will language evolve in these regards? Will anyone make a better oboe?

Personally, I do favour a common language, and standardized notation as a part of that.

I agree that Dorico has shown itself to develop “common rules first, then flexibilities”.

Who knows when Dorico 6 will be here, and what it will bring…

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@dan_kreider and @benwiggy
I was trying (not very successfully) to make the point that I don’t think that Finale should be criticized because it is flexible. That is something that Dorico should match while staying true to its core design. If it doesn’t, there are some who will not be able to use Dorico, which would be shame for all concerned.

@claude_g_lapalme I agree and have the same hopes.

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Yes, Finale’s ability to do anything was indeed its greatest attribute.

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I disagree with this statement. You can work toward multiple objectives simultaneously, and Dorico already separates functions into a semantic layer in Write Mode and a customization layer in Engraver Mode. What frustrates me is the expectation that user requests should be supported by examples from published music. While this may make sense for publishers, as working composers, we neither have the time nor access to a comprehensive catalog of published music. Our needs are practical, and whether these conventions appear in published music or not is irrelevant.

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I should have stated it better: it seems to me that the two initial approaches to design and development (graphical vs. semantic) are opposites. But over time, the semantic can move towards greater freedom and flexibility. The purely graphical approach, it seems, has a far harder time getting smarter with subsequent iterations. Dorico has already demonstrated the former behavior as it has developed. Previously you couldn’t do x, and now you can. And I agree with @John_Ruggero that this is a very good thing.

Dorico isn’t obligated to support every oddity that someone wants. If I wish for every third bar to be notated upside-down just because that’s the way I do it, it’s perfectly reasonable for a team with limited manpower and resources to ask for justification in the form of broader adoption. @benwiggy is right that Finale allowed the user to do anything. And the result, in part, was things like CPDL.

Lest I be labeled a blind devotee, I have my own list of things I want in Dorico 6 and beyond.

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