I have a score with 4 flows. The first and last are in 4/4, and the middle in open meter. Flow 2 is fine, but flow 3 for some reason keeps putting an extra “X” open meter sign at the beginning of bar 2. You can see in the galley view that there isn’t an extra meter:
But here in page view, there’s an extra X at the second line – this happens no matter where the line breaks (if I move the system break, the 2nd system X is unphased). If I change the meter at the beginning of the flow to something normal like 2/4, the meter disappears, but when I add the open meter sign back, the meter reappears.
Any ideas?
This is the designed behaviour, Jeffrey. When using the X time signature, it shows at the start of every system. You can hide the time signature via Properties, but this will hide it on all systems.
Thank you for the response – but I’m really surprised by your answer. When we are in 4/4, we don’t repeat the time signature at the beginning of each line; why would we repeat the open meter symbol at the beginning of every line? The symbol just cancels the time signature (“An ‘X’ placed on the stave cancels an existing time signature” —Gould); it seems a very odd choice to repeat it on every line.
But, if this is in fact the desired behavior (and I really do hope you might reconsider!), it doesn’t work consistently – the symbol appears only on the first two lines of this flow, not on the third line. It also only appears at the beginning of a different flow using no meter. I can’t attach the file here because it’s not my composition but here’s a screenshot of the left-hand side of the page.
OK, we’ll take a look and see if we can figure out at least the reason for the inconsistency. Perhaps you could zip up the project and PM it to me?
Now that 1.0.10 is out, I just want to update this thread that while I realize the intended behavior right now is to have the X symbol appear on every system, but I’m still only seeing the symbol inconsistently, on some systems.
Please, please, please give us a preference to only show the X (or Penderecki’s symbol) just once, like a normal time signature, or at least give us a way to select the “extra” X’s on additional lines to hide them.
Respectfully,
