my objective is to create a custom line that shows gradual transition between playing techniques, in this case sul tasto (s.t.) to sul ponticello (s.p.):
how did I do it:
create custom line annotations. for the start cap I just create an item in the text category of the line annotation editor:
for aesthetic reasons I chose half x height as vertical attachment point.
for the end cap I want to have an arrow combined with the other playing technique, sul ponticello. Unfortunately you can’t add texts to the category “arrowhead” in the annotation editor and can’t add arrowheads in the text category of the editor, so the only way I saw was to create a custom music symbol showing an arrowhead followed by the text item “s.p.”:
And as you already see: for vertical attachment you can choose top, center, bottom or baseline, but not half x height, as I chose earlier on the s.t. text, which leads to the result that I can’t find a way to make both text and music symbol appear on the same x height without just manually playing for each item:
Wait? That’s possible? Okay, that’s a whole other are of the program I didn’t even consider because I started my process of thought from the lines menu and not the playing technique menu.
I just wanted to create custom lines I can save in the lines menu to have the shortest possible input way for these technique transitions, so that I only need to select the line in the menu and don’t have to do anything else
The playing techniques grouping is an option I didn’t know about, so thanks for that. It will work I think, but still more steps for the input than a custom line.
And the main issue still is that there seems to be no option to align music symbols by their half x height, which could also be an issue with other things than playing techniques, in which case this workaround would not work.
So that’s why I’d like to ask the Dorico team if there is anything that speaks against a “half x height” vertical attachment option not only for text, but for music symbols as well
How about the custom line in this Dorico project? st to sp.dorico (1.2 MB)
In the line annotation named s.p. destination, I added a space character as a third item after the arrowhead and the s.p. text, and adjusted the Y-offsets of the text and the space character until the horizontal line was centered on the arrowhead and the baselines of s.t. and s.p. were essentially the same.
