Is there a way to have a paragraph style that has a negative indent (i.e., offset to the left)? In “Paragraph Styles”, the “Indentation” field doesn’t seem to work with negative values.
Basically, I’m trying to have a paragraph style that allows text to follow the same leftward offset that I’ve set my playing techniques to have so that they look the same relative to the attached noteheads.
Thanks for any suggestions!
I’ve never heard of the concept of “negative indent”. Can’t you eyeball it, using Alt/Left arrow to nudge it in small increments?
Having Guide Lines and being able to set user defined horizontal and vertical offsets for various categories of text would make it easy to do what you want. Finale already does this - hint hint.
The first line indent will do it. I use that to get my bar numbers over a bit. But since all the other styles are based on Default text, you’ll want to define a new paragraph style and use that for your staff text.
One additional problem I see is that the indent is an absolute distance, while the playing technique offset is set in spaces. So the offset won’t quite match with different sized spaces.
Thanks for the replies!
@notesetter – maybe “indent” is the wrong word… “offset” would probably more accurately describe what it is I’m trying to do, but I don’t see anything other than indent in the paragraph styles. And yes, I suppose eyeballing it is always possible, I just always prefer global settings to fixing things on a case-by-case basis!
@Mark_Johnson – yes, I’d tried first-line indent, and maybe that’s the best interim solution, but with multi-line text, it falls apart (which makes sense).
Thanks again to both of you.