Hello there,
I would like to add a page of performance notes. What’s the best method to do that? Currently I added a page before the first page on the Engrave mode, and inserted a text box.
Second question, the one in the topic title, is:
If I’d like to define a symbol used in the music, perhaps an arrow pointing to the right, made readily available in the right toolbox, how do I insert that symbol of the right arrow in a text box of where I put the performance notes? I’m doing a workaround right now, where I just assign an arrow to a note, and then moving it (in engrave mode) to the performance notes page. Is this a hack?
I’d recommend considering creating a page template for your performance notes, as if you only create it locally on an inserted page, it’s categorised as a page template override and if at any point you remove the override, the whole page’s design would get lost. If it’s a page template, it’s “saved” and you can re-assign the template to any page you like, with the bonus of being able to use it in more than one layout as well (because once a page template exists in a page template set, any layout also using that set has access to it).
(Side note: be aware that inserting/deleting pages at the start of a layout can result in any staff spacing overrides you have later getting lost, so have that in mind if you’ve moved staves around.)
For demonstrating notations and symbols, you could use the graphic slice feature to export an SVG of the relevant symbol from wherever it appears in the music, then import that into a graphics frame as part of your performance notes page. Relying on a real item’s graphical offset to look correct on potentially a different page to the one it’s anchored on isn’t as reliable, as any recalculation in the “home” position of that item will move it from where you’ve put it.
If you want to demonstrate noteheads or on-the-staff notations as well, you could also create a separate flow for the purposes of demonstrating notations, remove the notation flow from your page template frame chain, then only show it on the performance notes page in music frames of whatever size/shape works.