I create a text box, set the Opacity to 0%, then click OK. But nothing happens. When I re-open the text box, the Opacity is back to 100%.
This happens regardless of whether I use the slider or enter 0.0. It also happens regardless of if I’m in Write or Engrave.
Everything else seems OK - I can enter text, change fonts, alignment, etc.
What am I doing wrong?
Are you talking about a green text frame created in Engrave mode, or a text item created with Shift+X or Shift+Alt+X in Write mode? You can’t change the background colour of a text frame, but you should be able to change the background colour behind text in a Shift+X text item, using the controls in the popover that appears while editing text.
Daniel - Very belated response. There are (possibly) two different things going on here.
Firstly, what am I trying to do?
This goes back to a problem I was having with a percussion player using multiple instruments (crash + sizzle + vibes) - and the full score was not showing the individual instruments. So my thought was to put a text box over the multiple instruments specification - and specify the individual instruments on separate lines inside the new text box. My hope was that the newly created text box would hide what was underneath. Now admittedly this is a very kludgy solution - especially since I would likely have to do it on each page of the score - but I was just experimenting.
As you can see from pic 1, you can see the text for the individual instruments, but the text box is not hiding what is underneath.
Changing Opacity does not work
My next thought was that my text box background was transparent and not hiding what ever was behind it. So I opened up the text box again, clicked on the background and changed the opacity from 100% to 0%. That is in pic 2.
But when I closed the text box, nothing changed. So I re-opened the text box to see if there was something else I could do, but when I clicked on the background, the Opacity was back to 100%. See pic 3.
Dorico appears to be ignoring my attempts to change the Opacity.
Daniel - I know that you guys are doing some intense development work on Percussion and perhaps this will be completely unnecessary in the next release - but I would still expect my changes to Opacity to work. Am I doing something wrong? Perhaps my text box is already in the back - and so Dorico is saying there’s nothing behind my text box to hide? If so, is there any way to move my text box in front?
The controls in the text editing popover for foreground and background colour I think only actually work when you are using Shift+X text items rather than using text frames at the moment, I’m afraid. We do plan to make it possible to specify a background colour for frames, but this does not yet work.
I think that your specific needs for staff labelling will indeed be met by the forthcoming update, since you will be able to have quite flexible control over how each line of a percussion grid should be labeled.
I tried Shift+X and that also does not work - Opacity settings do not stick. Am I doing something wrong or is this too not yet functional?
As far as I can see, you can set the background color in text frames and Shift-X text boxes in the popover for the text. But this will only change the background color behind the letters. The rest of the box/frame stays transparent.
If I understand you right, you want to achieve, that a text box/frame covers the staff name. I did it this way: Delete the staff name in Setup mode so that nothing will be displayed for this staff. Then create a text box (Shift-X) or frame, type in your individual staff names and drag it to the left of the staff. You won’t even have to set a background color.
Thomas
Thomas - That was one of the first things I tried. Unfortunately, what seems to happen is that the instrument names also disappear from the parts, so there is no way of telling which instrument should be playing.
I suppose I could add little text boxes for the parts that would indicate which instrument is playing, but that’s way to much work.
The next Dorico release promises to have a full solution for this.
I didn’t consider parts because in my case I only used the vocal score.
If you do not want to wait for the next update here’s another workaround: Cover the staff name by a graphics frame and insert a png-graphic that is a completely white rectangle. Then add a text frame and input your own staff name.
Thomas
