I understand that the layout and engraving of music is closely tied to the page size, but I’m working on a project where I will display a score inside an app as one long horizontal scroll and allow the user to interact with the score, like hide a staff or rearrange things, etc. I’m looking for a way to export a score to a graphical format and just have every measure sized/spaced according to what looks best for the music in the measure, instead of stretching or squeezing different systems so they fit on a page.
It’s kind of like galley view. I want a way to export graphics of the score with every measure sized nicely on an infinitely long page. Except that I want the score to be condensed like in page view.
I’d also like a way to cut out each individual measure of each system into its own little PNG, but I’m willing to do that outside of Dorico.
As a follow up question, I’m wondering if Dorico supports other data output options.
For example I know you can output the score as a MIDI file, which you can inspect to find the start time for each note in the score. Is there a way to output the position of each note or the width of each spacing column so that I can associate each of the notes in the MIDI file with a visual offset, to automatically synchronize the visual score with the audio playback note-for-note?
Maybe these are kind of niche use cases but I’d appreciate any ideas anyone has!
Dorico can’t export graphics in galley view, but you could try setting an appropriately wide page size in Layout Options to mimic galley view, i.e. a page that is sufficiently wide that the whole flow appears on a single page. The issue you might run into is that I believe Qt has some limits on how big graphics files can get: you’ll be better off using a format like PDF rather than e.g. TIFF, but you may even run into limitations on page size in PDF (I’m not sure what they are!).
It might be that even if you run into a page size limitation, you can export, say, two pages and then stitch the resulting graphic together in another application.
Dorico doesn’t currently have a way of exporting information about the graphical coordinates for rhythmic positions, though this is something we have explored internally as part of looking at how we might prepare packages of data that could be put together on the web for sharing projects online. However, I don’t expect us to have the time to come back around to this imminently.
I tried this solution of making a really long custom page size, but when I try to export the score, the size of the PNG or PDF seems to be limited to real-world page sizes. In fact, the size of the graphic seems to be determined by the most recent selection for printing to a printer… Am I missing something? Why can’t I export a graphic the size of the page in Layout Options?
I tried to use the system dialogue page setup button to create a custom paper size and then select that in Dorico, but it didn’t work. I attached a picture of the error I got.
I think @dspreadbury you are right that ultimately these graphic images would be too large to work with anyway, so I’ll have to create a conventional score and go through manually to make sure the measures are spaced approximately equally.
I think it would be a really useful feature for digital applications like apps and websites to export the score as a series of tiles or to export each measure of each system with the files automatically named. That would open up a lot in terms of interactivity. Right now it feels like the printing features are really focused on physical paper printing, which I understand is the primary use case.
This only affects the preview in Print Mode. If you actually export the graphic in Dorico with the built-in graphic export you should find that the size in the layout options is respected.
To make one-measure slices, if you have a lot of them, I would do it in another software. For my part, I use Afiinity Designer for that and I have a page with already made with slices designate once, easy to copy because it is aligned magnetized, we can first draw a table, make slices, then place the pdf export from Dorico.
Here is an example for a sight-reading course on my online music site, with a lot of exercises using a lot of slices used as a flashcard, I then created a script to display them randomly at the speed we want or not not etc…
here’s a sped up gif as example
Super!
Education is not about learning facts, but about training the mind to think! A. Einstein
It’s an ecological method in tune with the times, to avoid wasting paper, you put the key you want to train what you want.
Lots of reading methods use this, for example in your country: “Manuel pratique de lecture horizontale et verticale” Mangeot
Yes. I used to use the Manuel de lecture de notes de Françoise Gervais, which should be read in all seven clefs… None the less, how can you expect someone to read notes if you don’t tell beforehand which clef it’s written in?
@MarcLarcher
In fact it’s a gifscreen of a portion of an online music course page whose purpose was to answer about slices, I didn’t think it would go in another direction and indeed I should have translated the upper part of this gif:
Which means: reading by note group in key of G
That being said, let’s try not to stray from the subject of the post!
On the other hand is it possible that you no longer respond to my posts, I always have the impression that you have a grudge against me and this is counterproductive.
Thanks
I’m sorry I left you with such impression: just trying to help here. You’re right, with the whole content it makes totally sense, forgive me for thread-hacking🙏
