I want to make a few special symbols, such as wiggly lines with arrows at the end to indicate a time limit for continuing an improvisation.
the arrows are available in various forms and I can replace something that I will not use, such as pppppp dynamic (never have); but I can place this
in category empty and save it. Then I am not sure how to access it in the score.
Sorry, I’m not sure I follow: if you’re talking about Engrave > Music Symbols, you can’t change the category of any of the music symbols in there. Can you be a bit more specific about what you mean?
I was able to remove a dynamic symbol that I would never use and replace it with an arrow but then I didn’t have access to the long dynamic (pppppp) even if I have never used it. when I chose other, it had 4 possibilities, including one that was called empty. I guess I am confused as to how to use the category “other.” I am trying to find a place to put glyphs for repeated use, such as constructing wavy lines from several small lines (possible just from the ornaments box on the right) and adding an arrow to it: using a gliss, repositioning it and adding an arrow at the end of it, etc. If I put any glyphs in the other category and don’t have to replace items such as pppppp with it. or perhaps I am not sure exactly how this works.
Despite what Claude wrote in the Scoring Notes review of Dorico 2.2 last week, I wouldn’t advocate using the Music Symbols editor to try to repurpose things like dynamics as wiggly lines. Obviously the lack of wiggly lines is certainly an issue that we need to address, but when we do, it won’t be through mucking about with existing items with their own special behaviours.
I would suggest you do something like create a text item that contains your wiggly line or your arrowhead in a scratch project, and then copy and paste it into other projects as needed.
thanks for your assistance. I was not using the wiggly line as a dynamic but placed it there because I could call it up as needed. its purpose was to say "continue what is before (a box of fragments, loops, etc ) for the length of the wiggly line. will use your suggestion as above to make a mock project and copy from it. had to use sibelius last week for a quartet emphasizing graphics and music placed across the page. sibelius’s ability to remove staves and give a sense of fragments floating across the page is the way, but I was so use to dorico 2 that it was painful (actually, score still accomplishes this task the best allowing placement of fragments at totally different horizontal positions but might as well drive around in a model T). at 75 I am not sure that I will live to see dorico contain such cutout possibilites, etc but I have no regrets being “all in” at this point.
We certainly plan to add features to produce cutaway scores before too long, so I very much hope you will live to see it! Likewise support for things like cells and frame notation.