It would be nice if you would consider adding a “Musica ficta” accidental placement option alongside the current options, in order to display the accidental above the staff, as is usually done when adding editorial musica ficta accidentals to early music. It shouldn’t be too tough to quickly code and sneak this one in to the next update or release.
The current workaround, obviously, is to hide the accidental and manually add a accidental as text above the staff, but this sometimes wreaks havoc with vertical staff spacing, thereby requiring a lot of manual adjustment and intervention. Having a built-in option would be appreciated!
Significantly easier: create custom playing techniques for sharp, flat, and natural. PT are easy to add via the popover. And they tend to sit closer to the staff, so vertical spacing is much less affected.
I’d also like to see square brackets on accidentals and reduced sized accidentals.
There’s an old joke that every time someone says “It should be easy to implement”, a development fairy dies. You can’t possibly know how much work is involved unless you’ve seen the code structures.
Accidentals above the notes are useful for microtonal music as well, especially for almost tonal music where they can show that an accidental applies only to that note (in the general context of CP accidentals).
The PT workaround works quite well. My suggestion for popover text is “edf” “edn” and “eds”. I also use them as editorial/cautionary accidentals in newer music, taking up much less space than parenthesized full-size ones. Big downside of course is that they are not intelligent; you’ll have to babysit the accidental visibility properties across layouts. And they don’t change when for instance your editorial F# turns into Enat after transposing. So yeah, +1.
I was mulling this over more and wondering how it would work from a coding perspective. At first I thought, “perhaps they can use the same engine that intelligently positions fingerings / playing techniques…” and then it occurred to me, what happens when there are both? Now we have the issue of which order to apply them vertically, and then perhaps the need to allow for horizontal/neighboring placement… and then I smiled to myself. I’m glad I’m not the one tasked with figuring this stuff out; but my smile will be even bigger once they have.
The ‘hack’ for square bracket accidentals is to edit the Tonality System to include more accidentals, which you can design in the Accidental Designer to include square brackets. Then the accidentals will be available in the Key Sig panel.
The one problem is that because they have the same ‘raising power’ as the standard symbols, Dorico can’t choose between them when you transpose the music. (I haven’t checked what happens with transposing instruments.)
However, ficta accidentals over the staff should be an option from the properties panel, as they are essential when transcribing early music. Any workaround is less desirable.
It’s literally one click, once you’ve set up the PT. !!!
The team is well aware of the request, and I dare say it will come as an option in the Properties panel at some point, but until then, it’s hardly a struggle.
