No, there’s been no change in this regard. It can be done, but it’s a bit fiddly – I’ve just spent the last 10 minutes or so doing the attached. The basic steps are:
• Create a separate flow for the incipit
• Exclude the incipit flow from the master page main frame chain (the ‘Flows’ filter drop-down for the MA frame chain in the master page editor)
• Use the Note Spacing tool to indent the first system of the “real” flow to make room for the incipit
• Use a system break at the start of that first system so that you can set the ‘Staff labels’ property to ‘None’.
• Draw in a new music frame in the place where the incipit should go, and make sure the incipit flow is assigned to it.
• Add the appropriate clefs, etc. to the incipit.
• Consider setting the auto final barline of the incipit to e.g. ‘No barline’ in Notation Options.
• You may need to hide the rest(s) in the incipit, depending on whether you’re showing an initial note. Use Remove Rests if possible, though in this case I had to colour the rests via Properties to make them completely transparent.
• You may want to add a note spacing change at the start of the incipit to make it use narrower spacing.
• You may need to use the Note Spacing tool to indent the right-hand side of the incipit, depending on the value you have for justifying the last system of a flow on the Note Spacing page of Layout Options.
Hopefully one day we’ll have a proper feature for this, but until then this is perhaps better than a kick in the teeth, and as far as I know not much more laborious than doing a similar job in Sibelius or Finale.
incipit.dorico.zip (307 KB)