Hi there,
I want to remove the song title from the Score Editor printout. When I make sure, that no title is entered in the score editor’s setting, the printout uses the CPR file title instead. I do not want that.
I want to remove title in order to have more space for the staff lines.
Thanks for your advice.
Hi Northunder,
there doesn’t seem to be an option to remove the title including the required vertical space. But you could enter a single space into the title field to get rid of the text and adjust the top margin as desired.
yeah, on the one hand the new score editor is advertised as “Dorico-nice” with the focus highly on the optical appearance, for the price of losing many, many music-editing features of the old score editor. On the other hand, editing on the graphic side is extremely limited. If you don´t like, what the editor has “on it´s mind”, you´re lost.
Editing the title should work with a simple double click, where getting rid of it at all should be an option!
I don’t think they can easily add such a thing into Cubase without adding a whole bunch of other things. Dorico is essentially two programs in one - a notation program and a mini desktop publishing (DTP) program. The title and such are text frames in Dorico’s engrave mode where the mini DTP engine is located. This separation means there is a huge amount of flexibility in doing unusual layouts in Dorico, but also means they would need to add large swaths of the engrave mode desktop publishing engine to Cubase just to allow “getting rid of the title” in this way.
I should also add it is extremely unusual to want to get rid of the title completely to make room for the music. If the problem is that there is too little music fitting on the page, either due to the size of staves and all musical objects being too large, or excessive vertical space between the staves, usually you want to address this (which you can do) instead of trying to delete the title.
So this can be a case of the so-called “XY problem”: https://xyproblem.info/
The XY problem is where the user sees an issue (ex. not enough space for the music on the page) and sees one way of solving it (in this case, hiding the title) when there may be other ways.
editing something by (double)clicking it is the most basic thing since the invention of the mouse.
Speculating about the programmers intentions, the possible restrictions of the code and the usefulness of what a user wants to achieve is pointless…
Yes, and you can do this in Dorico. Double clicking on the title of the piece on the score causes the Project Info dialog box to open where you can set the title (the equivalent to “Score Settings” in cubase). Perhaps they can do something similar in Cubase where double clicking on the title could automatically open the Score Settings dialog. Keep in mind that it is not the same thing as entering directly on the page like you might in another notation program though (or something like word where you might edit directly “on the page”).
Direct entry does not work because it is not a simple heading - this isn’t like Microsoft Word but is more like a Desktop Publishing system as I said. If you do go to edit the title directly on the page (like you might in another notation program), instead of the title, you see the placeholder token ({@projectTitle@}):
Normally you don’t change this {@projectTitle@} to the title manually because it is a special “token” that gets auto replaced with the title as set in the score settings. In this case if you delete the token completely then you have an empty box for the text frame:
I’m not sure how much this would practically help the original poster in the thread (or anybody) because it still takes up the space even though it has been deleted. You’d have to select the green frame to delete the green frame.
Now the green frame is gone at the top but I would still have the empty space and the two green text frames for lyricist/composer taking up space. If I don’t care about the title probably I don’t want those frames either so I’ll delete those two green frames.
And now I still have this empty space up at the top because my blue music frame is not tall enough on the first page, so I have to take the top of the blue music frame and drag it up to resize the frame box so it goes up to the top of the page.
And that gets rid of the empty space that was left at the top for the title/composer/lyricist. As you can see it was not one simple/quick edit but several. All content on a page has to be inside “frames”, with graphics frames, text frames, and music frames. It is completely different with something like Microsoft Word where it is just a free document with the text just sitting on the page - in Dorico everything on the page has to be in a frame, and a page with no frames will be blank. I had to edit the frames, delete three of the text frames, and resize one of the music frames. A lot of these controls do not exist in Cubase right now like they do in Dorico and they would have to build them for this operation that might seem very simple to you.
I’m not speculating about the design here. I know exactly how Dorico works, and the Cubase Score Editor is essentially Dorico at its core but missing many options from the user interface (and probably other parts of the engine like Condensing). All these things still work in the same way with Cubase in terms of the frames that I’ve shown in the screenshots above, the difference is that in Cubase there is no way to edit this without building a whole mode/view for that.
It isn’t a super simple thing like a Word document where you have a title and you want to edit it or delete it and everything moves up. Desktop publishing systems separate out the content from the layout for flexibility. It doesn’t make sense to me, given the structure that is in place, to provide the user with a way to double click on the title and delete it and have everything else on the page move up to fill the space the title would have had - it isn’t possible to do this in a simple way in Dorico either (you can only do this the way I showed above in those screenshots).
I also don’t think it is very likely that they would want to put the effort into bringing all of Dorico’s engrave mode into Cubase, so that’s why I was trying to narrow down what is the actual problem @Northunder was trying to solve. Because maybe changing some of the settings that are there now will allow more music to fit on the first page and solve the problem a different way.
Or, @Martin90 's suggestion also seems to work as a workaround, as long as there is only the one page. It is not how I would do things in Dorico though.
@Northunder can you please post a screenshot of what the first page of your score currently looks like so we can see what the situation is. This will help to advise you about the best strategy.
thanks for the detailed explanation!
Just want to add this:
Cubase 12
Guitar Pro
Maybe unused frames should have zero height in C14…
Yes, I’m sure it is just that simple in Cubase 12 or Guitar Pro. But you can’t just delete the title in Dorico and have it not take up space automatically. It’s not the same program.
The DTP engine in Dorico means that you can’t just do a “simple” task like delete the text frame for the heading and have the music automatically move upwards to where the heading used to be. But on the flip side, it makes certain super complicated layouts super easy. For instance I personally made this for a class in Dorico:
And here you can see my Dorico window with the original file open where all the individual text frames are visible as green boxes (except where obscured by black borders around them) and individual music frames are blue boxes:
That took me only a few hours to do in Dorico. I created about 20 individual text frames on the page as well as six individual music frames. Each of the six music frames pulls music from a different Dorico “flow” (which is a movement in Dorico, or different pieces of music in one file).
The ability to do these types of complicated things is the reason the DTP engine exists - I used to use Sibelius before Dorico and could NOT have made this worksheet entirely in Sibelius easily. It would have been a ton more work, if not impossible. I did have to do worksheets like that in Sibelius and I can tell you that I probably would have resorted to just making the individual music examples as 6 individual Sibelius files, exporting them as graphics, and bringing them into Word or some other application. But in Dorico it is really great because this powerful DTP engine lets me do things like this without having to bring in another application. And I can edit all of those musical examples easily because they are just music frames…
So this is the flip side to your examples. I bet you cannot do this quite as easily in Guitar Pro, or even in Cubase 12 (where I know a lot of things are possible), as I have here in Dorico.
I use this complicated layout system quite often for music scores, for doing title pages and front matter and other complicated things that often people resort to making in MS Word or other programs. This way I can keep everything in one file. And because of the separation of content and page design that the mini-DTP engine in Dorico makes possible, I don’t have to individually make these in each file. If I make them as templates and tokenize them, I can apply them to other files and bring in this nicely designed title page and it automatically updates to the correct piece title, subtitle, dedication, program notes, instrument list, etc., etc. And then my title and front matter are nearly done without me having done anything except import my page templates from another file.
Consider this: With my worksheet example above, would I even want this behavior that you are suggesting? Like suppose I wanted to redo the heading at the top that says additional examples. If I deleted the Additional Examples header, would I really want have it move everything up, by it trying to read my mind to guess what I want? Maybe I’m deleting the additional examples header to put an image there instead and I want to delete it without things shifting up. This involves deleting the text frame and making a graphics frame to bring in the picture. If it had your behaviour then everything else on that additional examples page would “move up” to fill the gap left by the title but if I meant to put an image there I would somehow have to undo that. Also what do you expect it to do if frames are side by side like this and one is deleted - expand the other one sideways? At that point I’m fighting against a program that thinks it is smarter than me and knows what I want and is automatically forcibly doing things I don’t want, and that would get really frustrating.
The design of Dorico/Cubase means that seemingly “simple things” like deleting the title and having the music shift up (which I’m sure work fine in Guitar Pro and Cubase 12 and many other things) become more complicated. But the benefit is that you can easily do complicated things like this worksheet that normally you would have to bring two programs together (like Sibelius and MS Word) to make.
Hi,
wow, so much text for such a necessary, useful and simple thing to not display a title.
I need it too.
You can easily make it not display the title, but it is having the title take up no space on the page that is much more involved (currently not possible).
