Poco accent?

My ancient manuscript has this: a poco accent sign:

Screenshot 2023-01-25 at 5.42.36 PM

What’s the best way to emulate this in Dorico? I tried adding staff text (shift-X) but the text is far too big, and not attached to the accent. I’m aware I could move it under the staff, and change its italicization, but is there any better way to do it? This is how it looks right now:

Screenshot 2023-01-25 at 5.43.59 PM

You can select the accent in engrave mode and flip it above, so they’re together. (Or you could flip “poco” below, but I think above is better in this case.) The word should be in italics, and you can make it any size you want. You might want to shift it a bit to the left so it looks more centered on the note.

Sorry for reviving this old thread, but I’m now revisiting this issue and not yet happy with the Dorico results. This is what I got it to look like currently:

Screenshot 2023-04-04 at 8.10.35 PM

But as you can see, it doesn’t really look like the “poco” pertains to the accent. Should I be using system text for this? Or should I perhaps do this a different way? It would be great to get the “poco” attached to the accent, italicized, and in smaller centered text. Then this technique is used repeatedly throughout the score, so I’d like to be able to apply it easily.

What’s the best way to do that?

You could make the text cue sized or you could create a custom playing technique with the “poco” text - I think this will centre the text. I’m not familiar with this method but you might be able to put the accent in the playing technique too?

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You have complete control over shift x text… you can make it any font or size that you want, and then place it wherever it looks appropriate in engrave mode. I’m rather confused why you can’t change it to look like you want. Are you using a paired down version of dorico that doesn’t permit this?

I’m using the full version. But this “poco accent” is something that’s used quite a bit in this score, so I’d like a way to “automate” it - in other words - not have to manually create a “poco,” change its font size and italicization, switch to engrave mode, manually center it on the note, etc.

I do realize I can copy and paste one of them once I have it perfect, but I’m just trying to learn the “right” Dorico way to create this, and I’m worried that if I use system text (shift-X) and manually change font size and italicization then eyeball it in Engrave mode (which might render slightly differently on score vs. parts), that there might be a better way out there that I wasn’t aware of.

I’ve never learned how to do this, but should I be looking at creating an entirely new articulation, combining the > sign with the “poco” text?

Create a custom playing technique:

Screenshot 2023-04-05 at 1.29.47 PM

Here’s a quick project where I added it so you can see what I did. In the playing techniques editor under “poco accent”.
poco accent custom.dorico (433.9 KB)

I used one of the baked in text styles for this demo, but you could also create a custom paragraph style that has exactly the font metrics you desire, and then use that as the style of the text.

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@Romanos that is REALLY nice. I think that’s the best solution. Thanks so much. I’ll have to learn how to create custom playing techniques, or else figure out how to import this one from your file.

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My pleasure.

Here’s the page in the manual that talks about how this all works:

And you should be able to open the file I made and click the star icon in that dialogue and it should show up in future projects. Just remember, you might want to change to a different paragraph style before you do that.

Much appreciated, thank you Romanos.

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